The effect on many a nature, after the first burst of thankfulness was over, would have been a hardening one. The bright sunshine of prosperity, without any of the rain of affliction, would have dried up the fair soil, withered, and caused to die, the good seed.
But on Flo the effect was different; she never forgot one thing, and this memory kept all else straight within her. In counting up her mercies, she never forgot that it was God who gave them to her; and in return she gave Him, not love as a duty, but love rising free and spontaneous out of a warm, strong heart.
And He whom she loved she longed to hear more of, and Mrs Jenks, whose love for God and faith in God was as great as her own, loved to tell her of Him.
So these two, in their simple, unlearned way, held converse often together on things that the men of this world so seldom allude to, and doubtless they learned more about God than the men of this world, with all their talents and cultivated tastes, ever attain to.
It was Mrs Jenks’ simple plan to take all that the Bible said in its literal and exact meaning, and Flo and she particularly delighted in its descriptions (not imagery to them) of Heaven.
And when Mrs Jenks read to Flo out of the 21st and 22nd chapters of the Revelation, the child would raise her clear brown eyes to the autumn sky, and see with that inner sense, so strong in natures like hers, the gates of pearl and golden streets. God lived there—and many people who once were sad and sorrowful in this world, lived there—and it was the lovely happy home where she hoped she and Dick should also live some day.
“And you too, Mrs Jenks, and that poor lad of yours,” she would say, laying her head caressingly on the little woman’s knee.
But Mrs Jenks rather wondered why Flo never mentioned now that other Jenks, her namesake, who was wearing out his slow nine months’ imprisonment in the Wandsworth House of Correction.
Once Flo had been very fond of him, and his name was on her lips twenty times a day, now she never spoke of him.
Why was this? Had she forgotten Jenks? Hardly likely.