“Yes.  I should have written to-day.  I fancy how he watches the mail.  But I am in a great state of indecision.  My heart is not in his plan.”

“Is your heart in buying and selling laces?”

“I don’t see why you need put it that way,” he returned, with some irritation.  “Don’t you like my business?”

“Do you?”

“I like what it gives me to do.”

“I should not choose it if I were a man.”

“What would you choose?”

“I have not considered sufficiently to choose, I suppose.  I should want to be one of the mediums through which good passed to my neighbor.”

“What would you choose for me to do?”

“The thing God bids you do.”

“That may be to buy and sell laces.”

“It may be.  I hope it was while you were doing it.”

“You mean that through this offer of father’s God may be indicating his will.”

“He is certainly giving you an opportunity to choose.”

“I had not looked upon it in that light.  Marjorie, I’m afraid the thought of his will is not always as present with me as with you.”

“I used to think I needed money, like Aunt Prue, if I would bless my neighbor; but once it came to me that Christ through his poverty made us rich:  the world’s workers have not always been the men and the women with most money.  You see I am taking it for granted that you do not intend to decide for yourself, or work for yourself.”

“No; I am thinking of working for you.”

“I am too small a field.”

“But you must be included.”

“I can be one little corner; there’s all Middlefield beside.  Isn’t there work for you as a citizen and as a Christian in our little town?  Suppose you go to Middlefield with the same motives that you would go on a mission to India, Africa, or the Isles of the Sea!  You will not be sent by any Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, but by him who has sent you, his disciple, into the world.  You have your experience, you have your strength, you have your love to Christ and your neighbor, to give them.  They need everything in Middlefield.  They need young men, Christian young men.  The village needs you, the Church needs you.  It seems too bad for all the young men to rush away from their native place to make a name, or to make money.  Somebody must work for Middlefield.  Our church needs a lecture room and a Sunday school room; the village needs a reading room—­the village needs more than I know.  It needs Christian push.  Perhaps it needs Hollis Rheid.”

“Marjorie, it will change all my life for me.”

“So it would if you should go West, as you spoke last night of doing.  If you should study law, as you said you had thought of doing, that would change the course of your life.  You can’t do a new thing and keep to the old ways.”

“If I go I shall settle down for life.”

“You mean you will settle down until you are unsettled again.”