For the remainder of the day Kate was unblushingly insane.  She started to do a hundred things and abandoned all of them to go out and look up at the sky and to cry repeatedly:  “Praise the Lord!”

If she had been asked to explain why she did this, Kate could have answered, and would have answered:  “Because I feel like it!” She had been taught no religion as a child, she had practised no formal mode of worship as a woman.  She had been straight, honest, and virtuous.  She had faced life and done with small question the work that she thought fell to her hand.  She had accepted joy, sorrow, shame, all in the same stoic way.  Always she had felt that there was a mighty force in the universe that could as well be called God as any other name; it mattered not about the name; it was a real force, and it was there.

That day Kate exulted.  She carried the baby down to the brook in the afternoon and almost shouted; she sang until she could have been heard a mile.  She kept straight on praising the Lord, because expression was imperative, and that was the form of expression that seemed to come naturally to her.  Without giving a thought as to how, or why, she followed her impulses and praised the Lord.  The happier she grew, the more clearly she saw how uneasy and frightened she had been.

When Nancy Ellen came, she took only one glance at Kate’s glorified face and asked:  “What in this world has happened to you?”

Kate answered in all seriousness:  “My Lord has ‘shut the lions’ mouths,’ and they are not going to harm me.”

Nancy Ellen regarded her closely.  “I hope you aren’t running a temperature,” she said.  “I’ll take a shot at random.  You have found out that the Peters family can’t take Little Poll.”

Kate laughed joyously.  “Better than that, sister mine!” she cried.  “I have convinced Henry that he doesn’t want her himself as much as he wants me to have her, and he can speedily convert his family.  He will do nothing more!  He will leave me in peace with her.”

“Thank God!” said Nancy Ellen.

“There you go, too!” cried Kate.  “That’s the very first thought that came to me, only I said, ‘Praise the Lord,’ which is exactly the same thing; and Nancy Ellen, since Robert has been trying to praise the Lord for twenty years, and both of us do praise Him when our time comes, wouldn’t it be a good idea to open up our heads and say so, not only to ourselves and to the Lord, but to the neighbours?  I’m afraid she won’t understand much of it, but I think I shall find the place and read to Little Poll about Abraham and Isaac to-night, and probably about Hagar and Ishmael to-morrow night, and it wouldn’t surprise me a mite to hear myself saying ‘Praise the Lord,’ right out loud, any time, any place.  Let’s gather a great big bouquet of our loveliest flowers, and go tell Mother and Polly about it.”

Without a word Nancy Ellen turned toward the garden.  They gathered the flowers and getting in Nancy Ellen’s car drove the short distance to the church where Nancy Ellen played with the baby in the shade of a big tree while Kate arranged her flowers.  Then she sat down and they talked over their lives from childhood.