It did not; yet Elizabeth could not pass on.  She was honest; she felt an obligation, arising from these words, which yet she did not at once recognize.  It stayed her.  She must do something —­ what could she do?  It was a most unwelcome answer that at last slid itself into her mind. Ask to be made one of ‘his people’ —­ or to be taught how to become one?  Her very soul started. Ask? —­ but now the obligation stood full and strong before her, and she could cease to see it no more. Ask? —­ why she never did such a thing in her whole life as ask God to do anything for her.  Not of her own mind, at her own choice, and in simplicity; her thoughts and feelings had perhaps at some time joined in prayers made by another, and in church, and in solemn time.  But here? with the blue sky over her, in broad day, and in open air?  It did not seem like praying time.  Elizabeth shut her book.  Her heart beat.  Duty and she were at a struggle now; she knew which must give way, but she was not ready yet.  It never entered her head to question the power or the will to which she must apply herself, no more than if she had been a child.  Herself she doubted; she doubted not him.  Elizabeth knew very little of his works or word, beyond a vague general outline, got from sermons; but she knew one servant of God.  That servant glorified him; and in the light which she saw and loved, Elizabeth could do no other but, in her measure, to glorify him too.  She did not doubt, but she hesitated, and trembled.  The song of the birds and the flow of the water mocked her hesitancy and difficulty.  But Elizabeth was honest; and though she trembled she would not and could not disobey the voice of conscience which set before her one clear, plain duty.  She was in great doubt whether to stand or to kneel; she was afraid of being seen if she knelt; she would not be so irreverent as to pray sitting; she rose to her feet, and clasping a cedar tree with her arms, she leaned her head beside the trunk, and whispered her prayer, to him who saves his people from their sins, that he would make her one of them, she did not know how, she confessed; she prayed that he would teach her.

She kept her position and did not move her bended head, till the tears which had gathered were fallen or dried; then she sat down and took up her book again and looked down into the water.  What had she done?  Entered a pledge, she felt, to be what she had prayed to be; else her prayer would be but a mockery, and Elizabeth was in earnest.  “What a full-grown fair specimen he is of his class,” she thought, her mind recurring again to her adviser and exemplar; “and I —­ a poor ignorant thing in the dark, groping for a bit of light to begin!” —­ The tears gathered again; she opened the second chapter of Matthew.

She looked off again to feel glad.  Was a pledge entered only on her side? —­ was there not an assurance given somewhere, by lips that cannot lie, that prayer earnestly offered should not be in vain?  She could not recall the words, but she was sure of the thing; and there was more than one throb of pleasure, and a tiny shoot of grateful feeling in her heart, before Elizabeth went back to her book.  What was the next ‘obligation’?  She was all ready for it.