I made a start with a compliment.  A sincere compliment is a good way to start being disagreeable to a person for her own benefit.

“Roxanne,” I said, with decided palpitation in my heart that I kept out of my voice, “you didn’t know, did you, that you are one fifteen-year-old wonder, done up in a feminine edition with curls and dark eyes?  How do you manage it all?”

“I’m not, and I don’t,” answered Roxanne with a laugh as she drew a long needle across a mammoth darn she was making on the knee of a stocking which was quite as small as the darn was large.  “I don’t manage at all; everybody will tell you so.  Miss Prissy Talbot says she can’t get to sleep at night until twelve o’clock because she has to pray about so many things that might happen to us poor forlorns if she didn’t.  I am mighty thankful to her, for I don’t have time to pray much.  I am so tired when I go to bed.  I just say ‘God, you know,’ and go to sleep.  He understands, ’cause Miss Prissy has told him all about it beforehand.”

“I just guess He does—­without Miss Talbot’s telling Him either,” I answered as I came and sat on the front steps beside Roxanne.  “And another thing, Roxanne—­I—­er, I don’t quite know how to say it—­but you—­you talk like you are—­that is, you seem to be friends with God just like you are with Tony Luttrell and Belle and Miss Prissy and the Colonel—­and me,” I continued with embarrassment.

“I am,” answered Roxanne, with beautiful positiveness.  “I decided to have Him for one of my friends ’most two years ago after Father and Mother died almost together.  When Douglass told me that we would have to sell Byrd Mansion and move down here in this old cottage that had been great-grandfather’s gardener’s house, with only Uncle Pompey to help me take care of it and him and Lovelace Peyton, he asked me if I couldn’t stand by.  I held my head up just as high as great-grandmother Byrd does in her portrait and said:  ‘Yes!’ ‘Then God help you,’ he said, and he hugged me up under his chin.  Then we all moved; and God has helped.”

“He must have,” I answered devoutly, meaning what I said.  And as I spoke something in me was loosened and I felt a wonderful difference about God.  The God that a governess explains out of a book to you and the One that really comes down and helps a girl friend so that she can speak of Him with confidence as a friend, are two distinct people.  I am going to feel about Him as Roxanne does and speak of Him when I want to and write about Him to you, Louise, just as I do about all of the other interesting inhabitants of Byrdsville.

“Oh,” laughed Roxanne, as she snipped a thread and began to cross-stitch the mammoth cavern, never dreaming of the momentous resolve she was interrupting in my heart, “it is not so bad this year, because Lovey has got so nice and steady on his feet and doesn’t put things in his mouth any more.  Now he is so busy hunting and doctoring his ‘squirms’ as he calls them, that I have lots of free time to mend and darn and work.  Of course, it is hard to have him keep them in his apron pocket and always carrying them in his hand when he hasn’t a bottle that smells bad to carry.  Just yesterday he brought a queer kind of—­Oh, what do you suppose he has found now?”