Marilyn looked at her sadly, contemplatively, and then twitched her mouth into a little smile:
“We're not getting on very well, are we? I don't like your costly entertainments, and you don't like my best Friend! I'm sorry. I must seem a little prude to you I'm afraid, but really, God is not what you think. You wouldn't hate Him, you would love Him,—if you knew Him.”
“Fancy knowing God—as you would your other friends! How dreadful! Let's go to bed!”
Opal began to get out her lovely brushes and toilet paraphernalia and Lynn let down her wonderful golden mane and began to brush it, looking exquisite in a little blue dimity kimona delicately edged with' valenciennes. Opal made herself radiant in a rose-chiffon and old-point negligee and went through numerous gyrations relating to the complexion, complaining meanwhile of the lack of a maid.
But after the lights were out, and Lynn kneeling silently by her bed in the moonlight, Opal lay on the other bed and watched her wonderingly, and when a few minutes later, Marilyn rose softly and crept into bed as quietly as possible lest she disturb her guest, Opal spoke:
“I wonder what you would do if a man—the man you liked best in all the world,—had got killed doing something to please you. It makes you go crazy when you think of it—someone you've danced with lying dead that way all alone. I wonder what you'd do!”
Lynn brought her mind back from her own sorrows and prayers with a jerk to the problem of this strange guest. She did not answer for a moment, then she said very slowly:
“I think—I don't know—but I think I should go right to God and ask Him what to do. I think nobody else could show what ought to be done. There wouldn't be anything else to do!”
“Oh, murder!” said Opal turning over in bed quickly, and hiding her face in the pillow, and there was in the end of her breath just the suggestion of a shriek of fear.
But far, far into the night Marilyn lay on her sleepless pillow, her heart crying out to God: “Oh, save Mark! Take care of Mark! Show him the way back again!”