“My soul!” said Aunt Hildy, “if the other world did have a fiery pit for liars, that man would have the best seat, and nearest the fire.”

Mother smiled and said, “He does not know, of course, that we have heard of this wife, for how should he?”

“Why, certainly not,” said Hal, “and I shall never tell him.  Let him do right if he can, and we perhaps can hardly blame him if he does want to hold on to the few who have proven their friendship, for I think his friends do not number many.  He needs them all.”

“Judgment is mine saith the Lord,” said Aunt Hildy.

“Well, that may be true, but I cannot feel that we are His direct agents for cursing the man.”

“Neither are we,” said Louis, “and if we obey the commandment, ’Love ye one another,’ where can the curse come?  No, no, Mrs. Patten, we must wait for the spirit of the man to grow good and true, and the weakness of the flesh by this will be overcome; he cannot forget all the wrong, and probably might recall the words, ’The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’”

“Well,” said Aunt Hildy, “I ’spose that’s the Gospel good and true, but I do get riled at his cuttings up.  I’ve seen ’em before, yes I’ve seen ’em before.”

And she sat as if feeling her way back through the mist of years.  I wondered what she had suffered, but she kept her own secrets close to her heart and held steadfastly to the truth doing much good.  Her busy fingers through the long winter evenings kept adding to the store of stockings she was knitting for somebody who needed—­and the needy would surely come in her path.

Aunt Peg and Matthias were quietly happy, and they came out of church every Sabbath and walked with a pleasant dignity homeward.  Matthias had memorized the old hymns and he could pick many of them out, having learned to designate them by their first word or line, and this he called reading.

“’Pears like I kin read a few himes, Miss Emily,” he said.  This is the way with us through life.  It seems to me we get the first word or line and then go blindly on making mistakes and grievously sinning in our ignorance, unknowing of the great beauty that awaits us in the perfect rendering of life’s beautiful psalm.

Clara said we were like children running through a meadow, trampling the daisies and clovers under our feet, and with breathless impatience hurrying on through the long day to the fall of night, and when the sunset of our earthly life came on, pausing then at the corner of the meadow, we gathered the few tired blossoms at our feet and passed out into the unknown.

“Oh, my Emily!” she said, “if our steps could be even and slow we should pick our comfort-daisies and our love-clovers on either side, while our feet still kept the one small path of our greatest duty; and this to me is the straight and narrow path spoken of.”

Her types of thought were so purely beautiful, and yet she drew them from the plainest facts.  She was growing nearer heaven daily, or perhaps we were seeing her soul more clearly through the days.  I thought and comforted myself that we should not lose her.