evenings, all threaded in and out, and associated indelibly with every seam.  There was the whole of “David Copperfield,” and the beginning of “Our Mutual Friend,” ruffled up into the night-dresses; and some of the crochet was beautiful with the rhymed pathos of “Enoch Arden,” and some with the poetry of the “Wayside Inn;” and there were places where stitches had had to be picked out and done over, when the eye grew dim and the hand trembled while the great war news was being read.

Leslie loved it, and had a pride in it all; it was not, truly and only, humiliation and disgust at self-comparison with the Haddens, but some other and unexplained doubt which moved her now, and which was stirred often by this, or any other of the objects and circumstances of her life, and which kept her standing there with her hand upon the bureau-knob, in a sort of absence, while Cousin Delight looked in, approved, and presently dropped quietly among the rest, like a bit of money into a contribution-box, the delicate breadths of linen cambric she had just finished hemstitching and rolled together.

“Oh, thank you!  But, Cousin Delight,” said Leslie, shutting the drawer, and turning short round, suddenly, “I wish you’d just tell me—­what you think—­is the sense of that—­about the fig-tree!  I suppose it’s awfully wicked, but I never could see.  Is everything fig-leaves that isn’t out and out fruit, and is it all to be cursed, and why should there be anything but leaves when ’the time of figs was not yet’?” After her first hesitation, she spoke quickly, impetuously, and without pause, as something that would come out.

“I suppose that has troubled you, as I dare say it has troubled a great many other people,” said Cousin Delight.  “It used to be a puzzle and a trouble to me.  But now it seems to me one of the most beautiful things of all.”  She paused.

“I can_not_ see how,” said Leslie emphatically.  “It always seems to me so—­somehow—­unreasonable; and—­angry.”

She said this in a lower tone, as afraid of the uttered audacity of her own thought; and she walked off, as she spoke, towards the window once more, and stood with her back to Miss Goldthwaite, almost as if she wished to have done, again, with the topic.  It was not easy for Leslie to speak out upon such things; it almost made her feel cross when she had done it.

“People mistake the true cause and effect, I think,” said Delight Goldthwaite, “and so lose all the wonderful enforcement of that acted parable.  It was not, ’Cursed be the fig-tree because I have found nothing thereon;’ but, ’Let no fruit grow on thee, henceforward, forever.’  It seems to me I can hear the tone of tender solemnity in which Jesus would say such words; knowing, as only he knew, all that they meant, and what should come, inevitably, of such a sentence.  ’And presently the fig-tree withered away.’  The life was nothing, any longer, from the moment when it might not be, what all life