than you could.’

‘Yes,—so I told him, and I tried to persuade him to talk with Dr. H.; but he was very unwilling. He said, I could have more influence over him than anybody else,—that nobody could do him any good but me.’

‘Yes, yes,—I understand all that,’ said Aunt Katy,—‘I have heard young men say that before, and I know just what it amounts to.’

‘But, mother, I do think James was moved very much, this afternoon. I never heard him speak so seriously; he seemed really in earnest, and he asked me to give him my Bible.’

‘Couldn’t he read any Bible but yours?’

‘Why, naturally, you know, mother, he would like my Bible better, because it would put him in mind of me. He promised faithfully to read it all through.’

‘And then, it seems, he wrote you a letter.’ ‘Yes, mother.’

Mary shrank from showing this letter, from the natural sense of honour which makes us feel it indelicate to expose to an unsympathising eye the confidential outpourings of another heart; and then, she felt quite sure that there was no such intercessor for James in her mother’s heart as in her own. But over all this reluctance rose the determined force of duty; and she handed the letter in silence to her mother.

Mrs. Scudder took it, laid it deliberately in her lap, and then began searching in the pocket of her chintz petticoat for her spectacles. These being found, she wiped them, accurately adjusted them, opened the letter and spread it on her lap, brushing[47] out its folds and straightening it, that she might read with the greater ease. After this she read it carefully and deliberately; and all this while there was such a stillness, that the sound of the tall varnished clock in the best room could be heard through the half-opened door.

[47]

After reading it with the most tiresome, torturing slowness, she rose, and laying it on the table under Mary’s eye, and, pressing down her finger on two lines in the letter, said, ‘Mary, have you told James that you loved him?’

‘Yes, mother, always. I always loved him, and he always knew it.’

‘But, Mary, this that he speaks of is something different. What has passed between——’

‘Why, mother, he was saying that we who were Christians drew to ourselves and did not care for the salvation of our 

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