“Yes, ma’am,” said Cherry, brightening. “It seems as if He had given me something to do, and there are you, and Mr. Richard, and Miss Ethel, to help. I should like, please God, to be of some good to those poor children.”
“I am sure you will, Cherry; I wish I could do as much.”
Cherry’s tears had come again. “Ah! ma’am, you—” and she stopped short, and rose to depart. Margaret held out her hand to wish her good-bye. “Please, miss, I was thinking how Mr. Hazlewood said that God fits our place to us, and us to our place.”
“Thank you, Cherry, you are leaving me something to remember.”
And Margaret lay questioning with herself, whether the schoolmistress had not been the most self-denying of the two; but withal gazing on the hoop of pearls which Alan had chosen as the ring of betrothal.
“The pearl of great price,” murmured she to herself; “if we hold that, the rest will soon matter but little. It remaineth that both they that have wives, be as they that have none, and they that weep, as though they wept not, and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not! If ever Alan and I have a home together upon earth, may all too confident joy be tempered by the fears that we have begun with! I hope this probation may make me less likely to be taken up with the cares and pleasures of his position than I might have been last year. He is one who can best help the mind to go truly upward. But oh, that voyage!”
CHAPTER XXIX.
Heart affluence in household talk,
From social fountains never dry.—TENNYSON.
“What a bore!”