If she had dared, how she could have leaned upon this friend! How she could have trusted her conscience and her fate to his decision!
"Does anything trouble you to-night, Miss Faith?" asked Mr. Armstrong, watching her sad, abstracted look in one of the silent pauses that broke their attempts at conversation. "Are you ill, or tired?"
"Oh, no!" answered Faith, quickly, from the surface, as one often does when thoughts lie deep. "I am quite well. Only—I am sometimes puzzled."
"About what is? Or about what ought to be?"
"About doing. So much depends. I get so tired—feeling how responsible everything makes me. I wish I were a little child again! Or that somebody would just take me and tell me where to go, and where to stay, and what to do, and what not. From minute to minute, as the things come up."
Roger Armstrong, with his great, chastened soul, yearned over the child as she spoke; so gladly he would have taken her, at that moment, to his heart, and bid her lean on him for all that man might give of help—of love—of leading!
If she had told him, in that moment, all her doubt, as for the instant of his pause she caught her breath with swelling impulse to do!
"'And they shall all be led of God';" said the minister. "It is only to be willing to take His way rather than one's own. All this that seems to depend painfully upon oneself, depends, then, upon Him. The act is human—the consequences become divine."
Faith was silenced then. There was no appeal to human help from that. Her impulse throbbed itself away into a lonely passiveness again.
There was a distance between these two that neither dared to pass.