“Effie,” said Christie one day, after she had been silently watching her a little while, “you are more willing that I should go now, I think?”
Effie started.
“I shall be willing when the time comes, my dear sister, I do not doubt,” she said, with lips that smiled, though they quivered too. “I cannot help being willing, and glad, for your sake.”
“And you ought to be glad for your sake too,” said Christie. “You will have one less to care for, to be anxious about, Effie, and I shall be safe with our dear father and mother in the better world. I never could have helped you much, dear, though I would have liked to do so. I never should have been very strong, I dare say, and—I might have been a burden.”
“But if you had been running about in the fields with the bairns all this time, who knows but you would have been as strong as any of them?” said Effie, sadly.
But Christie shook her head.
“No; I have had nothing to harm me. And sometimes I used to think if I had stayed at home I might have fallen back into my old fretful ways, and so have been a vexation to myself and to Aunt Elsie; and to you even, Effie, though you never used to be vexed with me.”
“No, Christie, that could never have happened. God is faithful, and with His grace, all would have been well with you. There would have been no more such sad days for you.”
“No such day as that when you came home with the book-man and gave me my Bible,” said Christie, smiling, “I wonder why I always mind that day so well? I suppose because it was the beginning of it all.”
Effie did not ask, “The beginning of what?” She knew well that she meant the beginning of the new life which God, by His Word and Spirit, had wrought in her heart. Soon Christie added: