Mrs. Harrington was sitting by her open window having her breakfast; she always took it in her bedroom. She never had understood her little daughters. She disliked finding fault with any one, and the loss of her husband had affected her so deeply that she felt nothing else mattered. Now she looked at them with a perplexed frown upon her face.
"Come in, and tell me quietly why you have been behaving in this extraordinary way."
Freda was only too ready to be spokeswoman.
She opened her box, and produced a slip of paper which she laid upon her mother's lap.
"You see, Mums dear, Bertie gave us the room. It belongs to him now, doesn't it? And Daffy and me are trying to be good and to do what the Bible tells us. And you know when Jesus Christ will stand at the door of heaven to let everybody in, He'll ask us if we've taken a stranger in, and given drink and food to the hungry and thirsty, and a lot of other things. If we haven't done it, we shall have to be goats, and if we have, we are sheep. And the sheep go inside heaven and the goats are shut out. And Daffy and me want to be the sheep."
Her mother looked at her gravely.
"I see. You explain very clearly. Go on!"
"Well, then, you see we had to find a stranger to take in, and an old man passed along the road, and we were sitting on the wall, and we asked him if he would like to have a bed for the night. We didn't know he was a wicked thief, and we told him how to get to the bedroom up the steps to the balcony, and Daffy and me couldn't get any sheets for him, so we took one of ours, and that's why Nurse found it out and was so angry."
Mrs. Harrington was looking at the paper upon her lap. She read it out aloud:
"I give to Freda and Daffy one of my bedrooms in this house for somebody that God wants to stay here.
"BERTIE HARRINGTON."