“Oh well, it didn’t! And a miss is as good as a mile,” said Mrs. Waring, cheerfully. She was so used to Phil’s hair-breadth escapes, that this one did not seem worth mentioning.
But Johnny went home, thinking at a great rate. Learning lessons was not wrong, nobody could say that it was. But it seemed that a thing good in itself could be made wrong, by being allowed to get out of place.
“It’s like what mamma said about ‘watching,’” he thought; “it isn’t that we must not ever do anything besides, but we mustn’t let anything ‘come between.’ If that little scamp had gone to sleep, now, it would have been no harm at all to pull my chair up to the sofa, so that he couldn’t roll off, and study till he woke. But he didn’t go to sleep!”
He had almost forgotten the base-ball match, and his brief, but very sharp feeling of disappointment. The “reward” is sure; not praise and petting, not the giving back to you that which you have foregone, but “the answer of a good conscience,” the “peace which the world cannot give,” the fresh strength which comes with every victory, however small, and which may, by God’s grace, be wrested even from defeat, when defeat is made the stepping-stone to conquest.
CHAPTER XVI.
ENLISTING.
It was Sunday, and Jim was walking home from church with the Leslies. A gradual, but very great change had come over him since Taffy’s death. He had grown nearly as cheerful as he was before it happened, and did not seem to be exactly unhappy, but only the day before, Johnny had said to his mother,—
“I don’t think Jim can be well, mamma; he let slip the best kind of a chance for taking me off, the way he’s so fond of doing, this morning, and when I come to think of it, he hasn’t said any of those things for a good while.”