"Yes, I understand. I asked the doctor about that. If Miss Anderson should be taken worse, you should be called."
"Promise!" whispered Lettice.
"I do promise, so far as is in my power. But this is only to comfort you. We think she is doing well. I told her the doctor forbad your coming. She seemed to think it was on her account, and I said no more. She would be unhappy to think that you were not well."
"But it's nothing. I'm only tired. People must be tired. If only I needn't keep away from her."
"Lettice, do you never pray?"
The question came unexpectedly, and struck home. She had been asked almost the same before—"Do you often pray?" But Prue asked, "Do you never pray?"
"I don't know," she said faintly, with a dim sense that the short form which she sometimes, not always, repeated at night, was scarcely what Prue meant.
"I think you ought to begin now. Sissie needs your prayers. If you were with her, you could do little—nothing more, perhaps, than Bertha and I can do. But God can do everything. He has all power in heaven and earth. Why do you not ask Him to take care of her for you, and to make her well again, if it is His will to do so?"
Lettice kept these words in mind. "She is in good hands," Mr. Kelly had said: and now Prue added, "God can do everything." Then the two questions came up, side by side: "Do you often pray?" "Do you never pray?" The two voices chiming in together, with another addition from Prue: "Why do you not ask Him to take care of her for you?" The rest of the sentence floated away unheeded: for what was the use if Cecilia could not get well?
Clasping her hands, she tried to carry out Prue's advice. "Please take care of Sissie; take care of Sissie; O please take care of her!" were the only words which would occur, but Lettice repeated them again and again, and a soft sense crept over her, that the petitions were surely heard. It was Lettice's first lesson in real prayer.