Glancing back, uneasily, I saw her raise an umbrella and set out upon her cheerless promenade directly in our wake, and I made a desperate essay at redressing the wrong.

“It is a pity Mrs. C——­ must go out this afternoon,” I said, shiveringly.  “She will have a damp walk.”

“Yes,” assented my companion, readily.  “That is the worst of being in this vicinity.  There is no street railway within half a mile.”

She went no further.  I could go no further.  The carriage was hers—­not mine.

Mrs. C——­ ’s brother did not call on me, nor did she ever again.  The latter circumstance might not have excited surprise, had she not treated me with marked coldness when I met her casually at the house of a friend.  In the busy whirl of an active life, I should have forgotten this circumstance, or set it down to my own imagination, had not her brother’s paper contained, a month or so later, an attack upon myself that amazed me by what I thought was causeless acrimony.  Even when I found myself described as rich, haughty and heartless, “consorting with people who could pay visits to me in coaches with monograms upon the doors, and turning the cold shoulder to those who came on foot,”—­I did not associate the diatribe with my visit to the writer’s relative.  Five years afterward, the truth was made known to me by accident.  Mrs. C——­ had judged from something said during our interview that the equipage belonged to me, and that I had brought Mrs. D——­ to see her instead of being the invited party.  I was now a resident of another city.  The story came to me by a circuitous route.  Explanation was impracticable.  Yet it is not six months since there fell under my eye a paragraph penned by the offended brother testifying that his opinion of my insignificant self remains unaltered.

Had he or his sister suspended judgment until the evidence against my ladyhood and humanity could be investigated, I should have had to look elsewhere for an incident with which to point the moral of my Talk.

Rising above the pettiness of spiteful grudge-bearing against a fellow-mortal, let me say a word of the unholy restiveness with which we meet the disappointments which are the Father’s discipline of His own.  “All these things are against me!” is a cry that has struck upon His loving heart until Godlike patience is needed to bear with the fretful wail.

Nothing that He lets fall upon us can be “against” us!  In His hottest fires we have but to “hold still” and bide His good time in order to see that all His purposes in us are mercy, as well as truth to His promises.  In the Hereafter deeded to us as a sure heritage, we shall see that each was a part of His design for our best and eternal good.

CHAPTER XIII.

“ACCORDING TO HIS FOLLY.”

The hardest task ever set for mortal endeavor is for us to allow other people to know less than we know.