Minnie looked at her in astonishment. "Why, Mabel, of course you never needed to feel such a thing—you have known about these things all your life!"
"Ah, yes!" replied Mabel, "I have known about them, as you say, but I have never known them. You know one may know all about a thing or person, and yet never know it or him by direct experience."
"That is true," said Minnie, reflectively. "But why did you always try to interest me in them, when you really felt no good effect from them yourself?"
"Please don't ask me that!" entreated Mabel, "It would be worse than useless for me to try to explain it, but it is a fact that I have never known such a change as you talk about—as what we call conversion must surely imply—so I have never been converted, and that is the reason, I suppose, why all my efforts to interest you were always vain. How could I hope to lead you to a Saviour I could not see myself?"
Minnie was silent. She could not understand Mabel's difficulty, and therefore did not feel able to discuss it. She could not say anything to comfort or console her either, from her own short experience, because she felt, notwithstanding all that she had just heard, that Mabel was years and years before her on the road—further by a long way than all the years of her life. She felt this but could not say it; it seemed to hover through her mind like a shadow, and she could not grasp it in order to put it into words.
Mabel saw how puzzled she was, and realized how dangerous it might be to her peace to communicate difficulties of such a nature in her present impressionable state; she therefore endeavoured to divert her mind into a safer channel by getting her to talk about herself.
"It is very silly of me," she said, "to speak thus to you who have so newly begun the race. What should you know of such things? Come, we won't talk about them, and I daresay I shall grow out of such morbid notions in time; tell me about yourself, I am sure it will do me good; you were telling me about how different you felt. Please do go on."
"But are you sure it won't affect you as it did before? I would like to tell you about it because of what it has led me to do, and because I would like you to feel as I do, if, as you say, you have never felt it." And Minnie looked at her with great tears in her eyes, and with a great pity in her warm generous heart, wishing she could give half her happiness to her friend.
"Go on, dear," said Mabel, "you don't know how much good it will do me."
"Well, but I must tell you, Mabel, that although I am very happy, it sometimes troubles me to think how little I am changed outwardly, and how nobody but yourself would believe anything of all I have told you. I am sure Mona Cameron wouldn't"—she stopped suddenly, half inclined to interrupt herself in order to retail to Mabel the incident of the previous day, but thinking better of it, she resumed—"It does trouble me more than a little, sometimes, but I'm not going to lot it. I know about the difference, and you know about it, and better than all, God who wrought it knows about it, so what can it matter whether the world knows about it or not?"