“But your father is with her and he will watch over her.”

“But she depends on me,” pleaded Linnet.

“Marjorie is growing up,” said Miss Prudence, hopefully.

“Marjorie!  It doesn’t seem to me that she will ever grow up; she is such a little puss, always absent-minded, with a book in her hand.  And she can’t mend or sew or even make cake or clear up a room neatly.  We spoil her, mother and I, as much as she spoils her kitten, Pusheen.  Did you know that pusheen is Irish for puss?  Mr. Holmes told us.  I do believe he knows everything.”

“He comes nearer universal knowledge than the rest of us,” said Miss Prudence, smiling at the girl’s eagerness.

“But he’s a book himself, a small volume, in fine print, printed in a language that none of us can read,” said Linnet.

“To most people he is,” granted Miss Prudence; “but when he was seven I was ten, I was a backward child and he used to read to me, so he is not a dead language to me.”

Linnet pulled at the fringe of her white shawl; Will Rheid had brought that shawl from Ireland a year ago.

“Miss Prudence, do we have right desires, desires for things God likes, while we are praying?”

“If we feel his presence, if we feel as near to him as Mary sitting at the feet of Christ, if we thank him for his unbounded goodness, and ask his forgiveness for our sins with a grateful, purified, and forgiving heart, how can we desire anything selfish—­for our own good only and not to honor him, anything unholy, anything that it would hurt him to grant; if our heart is ever one with his heart, our will ever one with his will, is it not when we are nearest to him, nearest in obeying, or nearest in praying?  Isn’t there some new impulse toward the things he loves to give us every time we go near to him?”

Linnet assented with a slight movement of her head.  She understood many things that she could not translate into words.

“Yesterday I saw in the paper the death of an old friend.”  They had been silent for several minutes; Miss Prudence spoke in a musing voice.  “She was a friend in the sense that I had tried to befriend her.  She was unfortunate in her home surroundings, she was something of an invalid and very deaf beside.  She had lost money and was partly dependent upon relatives.  A few of us, Mr. Holmes was one of them, paid her board.  She was not what you girls call ‘real bright,’ but she was bright enough to have a heartache every day.  Reading her name among the deaths made me glad of a kindness I grudged her once.”

“I don’t believe you grudged it,” interrupted Marjorie, who had come in time to lean over the tall back of the chair and rest her hand on Miss Prudence’s shoulder while she listened to what promised to be a “story.”