Thus for a month or more she ran a giddy round of worldly pleasures, scarcely taking time to think, and refusing to listen to the warnings and upbraidings of conscience.
But her gayeties began to tell unfavorably upon her health, the recovery of which had been her principal object in leaving home, and she was obliged to relinquish them in part.
Then a long storm set in, confining her to the house for a week, and keeping away visitors. She was forced to stop and consider, and a long, loving letter from her mother coming just then, freighted with words of Christian counsel, had a blessed effect in helping to open her eyes to her guilt and danger.
In the silence and solitude of her room, the sighing of the wind without, and the rain and sleet beating against the windows, the only sounds that reached her ear, Mildred read and wept over this letter, and over the mental review of the life she had been leading since coming to Roselands.
To a mere worldling it might have seemed innocent enough, but not so to Mildred's enlightened conscience; a butterfly existence was not the end for which she had been created; yet she could not shut her eyes to the fact that that was the best that could be said of her life of late; she had been neither doing nor getting any good, but rather the contrary—injuring her health by her dissipations, setting an example of worldliness, and falling behind in the Christian race.
She had not neglected the forms of religious service,—had attended church every Sunday, read her Bible, and repeated a prayer night and morning; but all, as she now saw with grief and shame, with a sadly wandering heart, thoughts full of dress and earthly vanities.
Alas! how far she had wandered out of the way in which she had covenanted to walk! and that though she had proved in days past, that "Wisdom's ways were ways of pleasantness, and all her paths were peace."
And as she questioned with herself whether she had found real enjoyment in these by-paths of worldliness and sin, she was forced to acknowledge that in spite of much thoughtless gayety and mirth, there had been no genuine, solid happiness, but instead a secret uneasiness which she vainly strove to banish, and could only forget for a time in the giddy round of amusement.
Should she go on as she had begun? No: by the help of God she would turn and find again the path she had left; even as her mother in this timely letter advised and entreated.