“Dear Miss Craydocke!” said Leslie, with a warm brightness in her face, as she looked up, “the world is full of business; but so few people find out any but their own!  Nobody but you dreamt of this, or of Prissy Hoskins, till you showed us,—­or of all the little Wigleys.  How do you come to know, when other people go on in their own way, and see nothing,—­like the priests and Levites?” This last she added by a sudden occurrence and application, that half answered, beforehand, her own question.

“When we think of people’s needs as the Master’s!” said Miss Craydocke, evading herself, and never minding her syntax.  “When we think what every separate soul is to Him, that He came into the world to care for as God cares for the sparrows!  It’s my faith that He’s never gone away from his work, dear; that his love lies alongside every life, and in all its experience; and that his life is in his love; and that if we want to find Him—­there we may!  Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me.’” She grew eloquent—­the plain, simple-speaking woman—­when something that was great and living to her would find utterance.

“How do you mean that?” said Leslie, with a sort of abruptness, as of one who must have definiteness, but who hurried with her asking, lest after a minute she might not dare.  “That He really knows, and thinks, of every special thing and person,—­and cares?  Or only would?”

“I take it as He said it,” said Miss Craydocke. “’All power is given me in heaven and in earth.’  ’And lo!  I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world!’ He put the two together himself, dear!”

A great, warm, instant glow seemed to rush over Leslie inwardly.  In the light and quickening of it, other words shone out and declared themselves.  “Abide in me, and I in you.  As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in me.”  And this was the abiding!  The sympathy, the interest, that found itself side by side with his!  The faith that felt his uniting presence with all!

To this child of sixteen came a moment’s glimpse of what might be, truly, that life which is “hid with Christ in God,” and which has its blessed work with the Lord in the world,—­came, with the word of a plain, old, unconsidered woman, whom heedless girls made daily sport of,—­came, bringing with it “old and new,” like a householder of the kingdom of heaven; showing how the life and the fruit are inextricably one,—­how the growth and the withering are inevitably determined!

They reached the benches now; they saw the Josselyns busy up beyond, with their chess-board between them, and their mending basket at their feet; they would not go now and interrupt their game.

The seat which the sisters had chosen, because it was just a quiet little corner for two, was a nook scooped out, as it were, in a jut of granite; hollowed in behind and perpendicularly to a height above their heads, and embracing a mossy little flat below, so that it seemed like a great solid armchair into which two could get together, and a third could not possibly intrude.