[CHAPTER XXII.]
SOWINGS.
"And thy soul may see the value
Of its patient morns and eves,
When the everlasting garner
Shall be filled with precious sheaves."
IT was a bright summer day, just after dinner. Julia Bradford stood in the front doorway, waiting for her particular friend Alice Trafton. Her broad-brimmed sun-hat lay upon the stop, and she was putting lines in her young face in the desperate effort to make sense out of what seemed to her a senseless paragraph in her despised Cæsar.
"Dear me!" she thought, closing the book. "I can't do anything with it. I suppose Herbert would help me, but I won't ask him now while Mr. Amesbury is here. I don't like him much. I wonder why it is that Bertie is so fond of him? I suppose it is because they are such old friends, but they are so very unlike. Lewie is nice, that's certain, and that is just the trouble; he thinks that being nice and proper, kind and generous, and all that, is going to open heaven's door. What puzzles me is, what did Christ come for, if we can live so as to merit God's favour?
"Oh, I am glad I haven't got to depend upon my good deeds as a ladder to climb into heaven upon. It would be too short to reach the threshold, and what would I lean it against? But that is just what Mr. Amesbury is depending upon. I heard him say so yesterday. Why don't somebody try to reason him out of such a dreadful mistake? I suppose that would not be easy. Why don't Alice come? What a silky, shiny hat that is, and that duster hasn't a wrinkle in it. The fellow always looks as though he were done up fresh every morning. But, nice as he is, I can't quite like him. There's something lacking."
Here she returned to her Latin puzzle for a few moments, then leaned out to look for Alice, and suddenly, as if a new idea presented itself, she threw down the book and sprang up the staircase. Returning a moment later, she took the shiny hat from the rack and slipped a folded paper under the lining, with an inaudible, "If it please Thee, O God, in thine own time, let this see the light and do its work."
Replacing the hat, she picked up her own, and went down the walk to join her tardy friend.
Herbert and Lewie were at home for their summer vacation, and as Lewie did not find his home more congenial, but rather less so, as the years went by, he had fallen into the habit of spending much of his time at the Bradfords's, and this is how it happened that the speckless hat and unwrinkled duster were hanging upon the hall rack upon that particular summer day.
"Am I late?" asked Alice, as she came hurrying down the street. "You see father had a letter that we were all interested in, and I stayed to talk it over. Uncle Philip has written to invite Henry to make his home with his family in New York this next winter, and I am to go to take care of him. He is to paint in the studio of some great artist, and I am to take organ lessons. Isn't it splendid?