[302]
]When the girl spoke the hush of the dying day seemed to have crept into her voice. “No, I wasn’t,” she said, “someway I knew it was going to be.” Then as Phyl’s eyes widened she tried to tell her something, struggled, kept silence, tried again; such talk came easy to neither, but deep currents were stirred to-day.
“Knew?” repeated Phyl.
“One night,” Dolly said, in the same low tone, “I felt I must do something. I felt I couldn’t just go on doing little things always,—staying at home and helping, and going to dances, and playing tennis. I used to think I should like to go as a missionary,—not to China, of course, only somewhere here where people were very poor and miserable. But that night I didn’t seem to want anything but to write books that people would love to read, and that might do them some good.”
“Well?” said Phyl, for Dolly had paused, and was looking with glowing eyes at the happy sky.
“I just prayed, Phyl. It seemed so simple. God had said all things were possible to faith,—that we were to Ask, and we should Receive, that all things whatsoever we should ask in prayer, believing, we should receive. He didn’t say we were to stop to consider if the thing we asked seemed impossible. He just said all things whatsoever. And I prayed, Phyl, that I might write books. All my life seemed to go in the prayer. And everything was—wonderful. I was [303] ]kneeling by the window, and the sky seemed to bend down all round me, it was so warm and close. We have never known just what it is to have an own Father, Phyl, but I knew that night. And I prayed and prayed, and I knew He was answering me. Oh, Phyl, if you could have seen the stars,—so large and kind!”
Phyl’s face was very soft and sweet.
“When mother was so ill, I prayed—just like that,” she said, “and I went to sleep knowing she would grow well.”
“This is only a little tiny book, of course,” Dolly said; “but it is the beginning of the answer. I shall write the others yet. Oh, Phyl, all my heart seems singing thanks.”
The laughing sunset sky had quietened as they talked, and the sweet gravity of early evening was stealing over it. From the garden the voices that had seemed music and part of the sunset when far away, came closer, and now, hearty and unsoftened, brought the girls back to earth.
Dolly pushed back her hair, and picked up a pen.