“Missy, Aunt Nettie's lying down with a headache. I'm afraid the piano disturbs her.”
“All right, mother.”
Lingeringly Missy closed the hymnal. She couldn't forbear a little sigh. Perhaps mother noted the sigh. Anyway, she came close and said:
“I'm sorry, dear. I think it's nice the way you've learned to play hymns.”
Missy glanced up; and for a moment forgetting that grown-ups don't always understand, she breathed:
“Oh, mother, it's HEAVENLY! You can't imagine—”
She remembered just in time, and stopped short. But mother didn't embarrass her by asking her to explain something that couldn't be explained in words. She only laid her hand, for a second, on the sleek brown head. The marvellous feeling endured through the afternoon, and through supper, and through the evening—clear up to the time Missy undressed and said her prayers. Some special sweetness seemed to have crept into saying prayers; our Lord Jesus seemed very personal and very close as she whispered to Him a postlude:
“I will fear no evil, for Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I'll dwell in Thy house forever, O Lord—Amen.”
For a time she lay open-eyed in her little white bed. A flood of moonlight came through the window to her pillow. She felt that it was a shining benediction from our Lord Himself. And indeed it may have been. Gradually her eyes closed. She smiled as she slept.
The grace of God continued to be there when she awoke. It seemed an unusual morning. The sun was brighter than on ordinary mornings; the birds outside were twittering more loudly; even the lawnmower which black Jeff was already rolling over the grass had assumed a peculiarly agreeable clatter. And though, at breakfast, father grumbled at his eggs being overdone, and though mother complained that the laundress hadn't come, and though Aunt Nettie's head was still aching, all these things, somehow, seemed trivial and of no importance.