Yesterday a Missioner had come to their village, and Nellie had gone to the service, and she had been dissatisfied with herself ever since.
The subject had been hindrances to prayer, and as Nellie stood beneath the trees breathing in the soft spring air, she recalled almost every word the Missioner had said.
She felt they spoke home, and her face was very downcast as she remembered them.
"Where do you think your hindrances to prayer come?" he had asked. "I will tell you; it is not in your outside life, among your acquaintances, in the shop or the club, the market, the school, or the pleasure party! You can have a smiling face there, and people say how nice you are and how pleasant! But the real man, and the real woman, and the real boy and girl are not seen in those places."
"It is at home, by your fireside, in the family life that we are ourselves, and it is there the great temptation comes to us to have our prayers hindered by unworthy conduct."
Nellie remembered it all, and she remembered, too, that her conduct to-day had somehow "hindered her prayers."
Her mother had asked her to do several things in the morning that she thought most unnecessary. She felt sure that no other mother would have wanted such a thing on a Monday morning!
She was a dutiful girl, and she did not refuse to do them, but she did them with an inward groan, which made them twice as hard to do.
Then the children had seemed tiresome, and one of them had torn his clothes against some barbed wire; the clothes had to be mended before he could go back to school in the afternoon. And while she was mending them at the top of her speed, he would keep on jumping in and out of bed, where he was waiting, and hindered her more than she could say.
At last the mending was done, and the children raced off to school a little late.