The next Sunday, Lillie rode over to Spindlewood with John and Rose and Mr. Mathews.

Never had the picturesque of religion received more lustre than from her presence.  John was delighted to see how they all gazed at her and wondered.  Lillie looked like a first-rate French picture of the youthful Madonna,—­white, pure, and patient.  The day was hot, and the hall crowded; and John noticed, what he never did before, the close smell and confined air, and it made him uneasy.  When we are feeling with the nerves of some one else, we notice every roughness and inconvenience.  John thought he had never seen his school appear so little to advantage.  Yet Lillie was an image of patient endurance, trying to be pleased; and John thought her, as she sat and did nothing, more of a saint than Rose and Grace, who were laboriously sorting books, and gathering around them large classes of factory boys, to whom they talked with an exhausting devotedness.

When all was over, Lillie sat back on the carriage-cushions, and smelled at her gold vinaigrette.

“You are all worn out, dear,” said John, tenderly.

“It’s no matter,” she said faintly.

“O Lillie darling! does your head ache?”

“A little,—­you know it was close in there.  I’m very sensitive to such things.  I don’t think they affect others as they do me,” said Lillie, with the voice of a dying zephyr.

“Lillie, it is not your duty to go” said John; “if you are not made ill by this, I never will take you again; you are too precious to be risked.”

“How can you say so, John?  I’m a poor little creature,—­no use to anybody.”

Hereupon John told her that her only use in life was to be lovely and to be loved,—­that a thing of beauty was a joy forever, &c., &c.  But Lillie was too much exhausted, on her return, to appear at the tea-table.  She took to her bed at once with sick headache, to the poignant remorse of John.  “You see how it is, Gracie,” he said.  “Poor dear little thing, she is willing enough, but there’s nothing of her.  We mustn’t allow her to exert herself; her feelings always carry her away.”

The next Sunday, John sat at home with Lillie, who found herself too unwell to go to church, and was in a state of such low spirits as to require constant soothing to keep her quiet.

“It is fortunate that I have you and Rose to trust the school with,” said John; “you see, it’s my first duty to take care of Lillie.”

CHAPTER IX.

A CRISIS.

One of the shrewdest and most subtle modern French writers has given his views of womankind in the following passage:—­

“There are few women who have not found themselves, at least once in their lives, in regard to some incontestable fact, faced down by precise, keen, searching inquiry,—­one of those questions pitilessly put by their husbands, the very idea of which gives a slight chill, and the first word of which enters the heart like a stroke of a dagger.  Hence comes the maxim, Every woman lies—­obliging lies—­venial lies—­sublime lies—­horrible lies—­but always the obligation of lying.