“I wish you’d tell me,” he said suddenly, falling back with her as the path narrowed again.  “What are the ’steps’?”

“It was a verse we found this morning,—­Cousin Delight and I,” Leslie answered; and as she spoke the color came up full in her cheeks, and her voice was a little shy and tremulous. “’The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord.’  That one word seemed to make one certain.  ’Steps,’—­not path, nor the end of it; but all the way.”  Somehow she was quite out of breath as she finished.

Meantime Sin Saxon and Frank had got with Miss Goldthwaite, and were talking too.

“Set spinning,” they heard Sin Saxon say, “and then let go.  That was his idea.  Well!  Only it seems to me there’s been especial pains taken to show us it can’t be done.  Or else, why don’t they find out perpetual motion?  Everything stops after a while, unless—­I can’t talk theologically, but I mean all right—­you hit it again.”

“You’ve a way of your own of putting things, Asenath,” said Frank Scherman,—­with a glance that beamed kindly and admiringly upon her and “her way,”—­“but you’ve put that clear to me as nobody else ever did.  A proof set in the very laws themselves, momentum that must lessen and lose itself with the square of the distance.  The machinery cavil won’t do.”

“Wheels; but a living spirit within the wheels,” said Cousin Delight.

“Every instant a fresh impulse; to think of it so makes it real, Miss Goldthwaite,—­and grand and awful.”  The young man spoke with a strength in the clear voice that could be so light and gay.

“And tender, too.  ‘Thou layest Thine hand upon me,’” said Delight Goldthwaite.

Sin Saxon was quiet; her own thought coming back upon her with a reflective force, and a thrill at her heart at Frank Scherman’s words.  Had these two only planned tableaux and danced Germans together before?

Dakie Thayne walked on by Leslie Goldthwaite’s side, in his happy content touched with something higher and brighter through that instant’s approach and confidence.  If I were to write down his thought as he walked, it would be with phrase and distinction peculiar to himself and to the boy-mind,—­“It’s the real thing with her; it don’t make a fellow squirm like a pin put out at a caterpillar.  She’s good; but she isn’t pious!”

This was the Sunday that lay between the busy Saturday and Monday.  “It is always so wherever Cousin Delight is,” Leslie Goldthwaite said to herself, comparing it with other Sundays that had gone.  Yet she too, for weeks before, by the truth that had come into her own life and gone out from it, had been helping to make these moments possible.  She had been shone upon, and had put forth; henceforth she should scarcely know when the fruit was ripening or sowing itself anew, or the good and gladness of it were at human lips.

She was in Mrs. Linceford’s room on Monday morning, putting high velvet-covered corks to the heels of her slippers, when Sin Saxon came over hurriedly, and tapped at the door.