“Not been to church to-day?” said Uncle Titus to Desire.

“I’ve been—­to Friend’s Meeting,” the girl answered.

“Get anything by that?” he asked, gruffly, letting the shag down over his eyes that behind it beamed softly.

“Yes; a morsel,” replied Desire.  “All I wanted.”

“All you wanted?  Well, that’s a Sunday-full!”

“Yes, sir, I think it is,” said she.

When they got out upon the sidewalk, Kenneth Kincaid asked, “Was it one of the morsels that may be shared, Miss Desire?  Some crumbs multiply by dividing, you know.”

“It was only a verse out of the Bible, with a new word in it.”

“A new word?  Well, I think Bible verses often have that.  I suppose it was what they were made for.”

Desire’s glance at him had a question in it.

“Made to look different at different times, as everything does that has life in it.  Isn’t that true?  Clouds, trees, faces,—­do they ever look twice the same?”

“Yes,” said Desire, thinking especially of the faces.  “I think they do, or ought to.  But they may look more.”

“I didn’t say contradictory.  To look more, there must be a difference; a fresh aspect.  And that is what the world is full of; and the world is the word of God.”

“The world?” said Desire, who had been taught in a dried up, mechanical sort of way, that the Bible is the word of God; and practically left to infer that, that point once settled, it might be safely shut, up between its covers and not much meddled with, certainly not over freely interpreted.

“Yes.  What God had to say.  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.  Without him was not anything made that was made.”

Desire’s face brightened.  She knew those words by heart.  They were the first Sunday-school lesson she ever committed to memory, out of the New Testament; “down to ‘grace and truth,’” as she recollected.  What a jumble of repetitions it had been to her, then!  Sentences so much alike that she could not remember them apart, or which way they came.  All at once the simple, beautiful meaning was given to her.

What God had to say.

And it took a world,—­millions, of worlds,—­to say it with.

“And the Bible, too?” she said, simply following out her own mental perception, without giving the link.  It was not needed.  They were upon one track.

“Yes; all things; and all souls.  The world-word comes through things; the Bible came through souls.  And it is all the more alive, and full, and deep, and changing; like a river.”

“Living fountains of waters! that was part of the morsel to-day,” Desire repeated impulsively, and then shyly explained.

“And the new word?”

Desire shrunk into silence for a moment; she was not used to, or fond of Bible quoting, or even Bible talk; yet sin was hungering all the time for Bible truth.