Finally she went to her room and returned in a few minutes with a writing case and pen.
“Dear George,” she began. “Weren’t you good to ask me to go with the family to the camp! I can’t think of any camp where I would enjoy myself more and I surely appreciate the invitation. But I can’t accept it this time for that is the time set for the conference to which I am really going this year. Our church has made it possible for me to go, and I know it will do much in getting me ready to be of help to those who have helped me so much. I shall have so much more to give when I have studied for the two weeks with those who know, and have given their lives to the service of others. ’Tis an opportunity that I couldn’t miss—not even for two weeks with you all. Thank you just the same.”
Mary read the letter, then as she sealed it, she said with a smile, “Marked for a mast! Marked for a mast! Surely I mustn’t bend or break if I can be a mast some day and carry a king’s colors. C. L.?... C. L.?... Ah, I have it. ’Tis the word that Mrs. Lane uses so 43 often—a Christian Leader! ’Tis wonderful to have her think I have been chosen to bear such a splendid name. I can hardly wait to meet the rest of the girls, who also wear the mark of the King, who will be there at the conference. I may be—oh, I hope I am—marked for a mast.”
HER NEED
She was just a girl with a foreign name, a foreign face and a bit still of a foreign dress. But she was a girl, just the same, and her face was full of longing. Her home was near to a settlement where many girls came for lessons and for play. But somehow they had never asked her to come, though often she had sat on the steps at night where they must pass her. She had seen them come with their arms about each other, talking and laughing and singing—and when they had passed, she had gone to her lonely hall bedroom and hidden her face in the pillow.
Oh, no, she didn’t cry. She was too brave to cry. She just suffered alone and longed for help.
It had been a year since she had left the home across the sea and had come to join her father in the land where “work was plenty and friends were easily made.” But she had found her father living where she could not and would not live. The friends he had made in America she could not and would not have for hers. So when she had grown proficient enough in the factory, she had gone to live in that loneliest of all lonely places—a boarding house.
The days had passed one by one. Some of the boarders called her fussy; some said she was cold; some said she was “stuck-up” and none of them had found that beneath the surface there was a sweet, gentle, lonely heart.