"Sister Louise, what do you think He said to them, when he took them in his arms?"
She was bending her fair head over a familiar picture, which she seemed to love to study—Jesus, with a fair, sweet-faced child in his arms and many others clustering around him.
Louise tried to call in her thoughts enough to answer—"Why, you know, dear, he blessed them."
"Yes, I know; but just what do you think he said—the exactly words? I wish I could have heard him."
There was intense pathos in the voice, but Louise's preoccupied heart did not notice.
"I don't know, Nellie, just the words; only I suppose he prayed for them, that his Father would take care of them and make them his own children."
Silence again in the room. Louise went on with her broken thread of thought, and the child's eyes were still riveted on the picture. Suddenly she spoke again, and this time the voice was so eager, so intense, that it called her sister back keenly and entirely from all wandering.
"If I could only have been there."
It was the echo of more than a passing fancy of a child; and Louise, looking at her, saw that her fair blue eyes were brimming with tears, and the large drops were staining the page before her.
"Why, my darling little sister, what is the trouble?" Her voice was full of sympathy now, and she dropped the work she had been listlessly sewing, and, drawing the little rocker toward her, put loving arms around Nellie.