“Dear Hetty,” she said, “It has been borne in upon my mind to-night that you may some day be in trouble—­trouble is appointed for us all here below, and there comes a time when we need more comfort and help than the things of this life can give.  I want to tell you that if ever you are in trouble, and need a friend that will always feel for you and love you, you have got that friend in Dinah Morris at Snowfield, and if you come to her, or send for her, she’ll never forget this night and the words she is speaking to you now.  Will you remember it, Hetty?”

“Yes,” said Hetty, rather frightened.  “But why should you think I shall be in trouble?  Do you know of anything?”

Hetty had seated herself as she tied on her cap, and now Dinah leaned forwards and took her hands as she answered, “Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life:  we set our hearts on things which it isn’t God’s will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow-men.  There is no man or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while you are young you should seek for strength from your Heavenly Father, that you may have a support which will not fail you in the evil day.”

Dinah paused and released Hetty’s hands that she might not hinder her.  Hetty sat quite still; she felt no response within herself to Dinah’s anxious affection; but Dinah’s words uttered with solemn pathetic distinctness, affected her with a chill fear.  Her flush had died away almost to paleness; she had the timidity of a luxurious pleasure-seeking nature, which shrinks from the hint of pain.  Dinah saw the effect, and her tender anxious pleading became the more earnest, till Hetty, full of a vague fear that something evil was some time to befall her, began to cry.

It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower.  But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is.  Dinah had never seen Hetty affected in this way before, and, with her usual benignant hopefulness, she trusted it was the stirring of a divine impulse.  She kissed the sobbing thing, and began to cry with her for grateful joy.  But Hetty was simply in that excitable state of mind in which there is no calculating what turn the feelings may take from one moment to another, and for the first time she became irritated under Dinah’s caress.  She pushed her away impatiently, and said, with a childish sobbing voice, “Don’t talk to me so, Dinah.  Why do you come to frighten me?  I’ve never done anything to you.  Why can’t you let me be?”