“You do not look like dying; your eyes are as clear as a bell, and there’s plenty of fun in you yet.”
“The fun and sarcasm are a little bit sanctified, I think; I never say sharp things nowadays.”
“Perhaps the answer to your prayer has not all come yet; sometimes the answer is given to us to spoil it or use as we please, just as the mother gives the child five cents in answer to his coaxing, and the hap or mishap of it is in his hands. Perhaps He has given you the wheat, and you must grind it and bake it into bread; be careful how you grind and how you knead and bake! To some people, like Sue Greyson, He gives bread ready baked, but you can receive more, and therefore to you He gives more—more opportunity and more discipline. To be born with a talent for discipline, Tessa, is a wonderful gift, and oh, how such have to be taught! Would you rather be like flighty Sue?”
“No, oh, no, indeed,” shivered Tessa, “but she can go to sleep when I have to lie awake.”
“Now I must go.”
“I’ll walk to the end of the planks with you.”
Tessa was too much moved to care to talk; the walk with Miss Jewett was almost as silent as her walk homeward alone.
XV.—SEPTEMBER.
If Miss Jewett had not been once upon a laughing time a girl herself, she would have wondered where the girls in Dunellen found so much to laugh about. Nan Gerard laughed. Sue Greyson laughed, and Tessa Wadsworth laughed; they laughed separately, and they laughed together; they cried separately, too, but they did not cry together. Nan knew that it was September, because she had planned to come to Dunellen in September; Sue knew, because so few days remained before her wedding-day; and Tessa knew, because she found the September golden rod and pale, fall daisies in her long walks towards Mayfield; she knew it, also, because her book was copied and at the publishers’, awaiting the decision over which she trembled in anticipation night and day. One morning, late in the month, she found at the post-office a long, thick, yellow envelope, containing two dozens of pictures; several of them she had seen long ago in Sunday-school books, those that were new to her, appeared cut or torn from some book; the letter enclosed with the pictures requested her to write a couple of books and to use those pictures.
“I’ve heard of illustrating books,” she laughed to herself, “but it seems that I must illustrate pictures.”