had a sermon in his pocket from the text, “The hairs of your heads are all numbered.”  He changed it at the moment in his mind, and, when presently he rose to preach, gave forth in a tone touched, through the very presence of that reminding beauty, with the very spontaneousness of the Master’s own saying, “Consider the lilies.”  And then he told them of God’s momently thought and care.

There were scattered strangers, from various houses, among the simple rural congregation.  Walking home through the pines again, Delight and Leslie and Dakie Thayne found themselves preceded and followed along the narrow way.  Sin Saxon and Frank Scherman came up and joined them when the wider openings permitted.

Two persons just in front were commenting upon the sermon.

“Very fair for a country parson,” said a tall, elegant-looking man, whose broad, intellectual brow was touched by dark hair slightly frosted, and whose lip had the curve that betokens self-reliance and strong decision,—­“very fair.  All the better for not flying too high.  Narrow, of course.  He seems to think the Almighty has nothing grander to do than to finger every little cog of the tremendous machinery of the universe,—­that he measures out the ocean of his purposes as we drop a liquid from a phial.  To me it seems belittling the Infinite.”

“I don’t know whether it is littleness or greatness, Robert, that must escape minutiae,” said his companion, apparently his wife.  “If we could reach to the particles, perhaps we might move the mountains.”

“We never agree upon this, Margie.  We won’t begin again.  To my mind, the grand plan of things was settled ages ago,—­the impulses generated that must needs work on.  Foreknowledge and intention, doubtless; in that sense the hairs were numbered.  But that there is a special direction and interference to-day for you and me—­well, we won’t argue, as I said; but I never can conceive it so; and I think a wider look at the world brings a question to all such primitive faith.”

The speakers turned down a side way with this, leaving the ledge path and their subject to our friends.  Only to their thoughts at first; but presently Cousin Delight said, in a quiet tone, to Leslie, “That doesn’t account for the steps, does it?”

“I am glad it can’t,” said Leslie.

Dakie Thayne turned a look toward Leslie, as if he would gladly know of what she spoke,—­a look in which a kind of gentle reverence was strangely mingled with the open friendliness.  I cannot easily indicate to you the sort of feeling with which the boy had come to regard this young girl, just above him in years and thought and in the attitude which true womanhood, young or old, takes toward man.  He had no sisters; he had been intimately associated with no girl-companions; he had lived with his brother and an uncle and a young aunt, Rose.  Leslie Goldthwaite’s kindness had drawn him into the sphere of a new and powerful influence,—­something different in thought and purpose from the apparent unthought of the present little world about her; and this lifted her up in his regard and enshrined her with a sort of pure sanctity.  He was sometimes really timid before her, in the midst of his frank chivalry.