“It set them to thinking, and” —she continued with a laugh— “I verily believe that I was in a measure the humble means of grace which brought two of them to conviction of sin and led to their conversion.
“Let me read to you part of a letter which cousin Will received and which he forwarded to me,” said she, drawing an envelope from her pocket. “It is from Ned Conro, the one with the blond mustache, you remember.
“He says,—let me see,”—and she glanced down the first page, and, turning the leaf, read aloud:—
“I began for the first time to do a little thinking that last six months at Cambridge.
“Somehow that cousin of yours had said something, that night I was at your house, which kept running through my head and bothered me every now and then. I began to wonder if I weren’t about as useless a lot as a fellow with two millions in his own right and a prospective Harvard sheepskin ever gets to be.
“I had shirked all the work that I dared to. I divided my time, as you know, pretty evenly between the Boston Theatre and Young’s Hotel. I had no incentive to work, and did not propose to follow in your steps and study a profession. I planned after I left college to go abroad for some years. I had some vague notion of a trip to India and tiger-hunting. At all events I meant to have good sport and plenty of it too.
“The last thing I thought of was giving up any fun to stay at home and play the home missionary. But every time I had settled the matter completely in my own mind, those stinging words of that girl would come back and make my ears tingle:—
“‘Oh, the last thing that you ever dream of is that you have a debt to pay and are basely repudiating it.’
“I had thought that all poppycock when she said it, but when she got her money and set to work practicing what she had preached, giving not only her money but her whole time with her money, that just stumped me.
“One day I took up a New York paper giving an account of her great library scheme. ‘There,’ said I, ‘Miss Brewster has done what no man I ever heard of would have thought of doing.’