If this were prayer, it was simply talking in a sweet, natural voice, and in the most simple and natural language, with a dear and wise friend. It was the most quiet and yet the most confident way of asking for just what one wanted, and nothing more. It was what Flossy needed.
She took long strides in her religious education there on her knees; and as they went out from that tent and down the hill to the meeting, there was born in her heart an eager determination to enter the lists as a Sabbath-school teacher the very first opportunity, and to pray her lesson into her heart, having done what she could to get it into her head. If her anxious and well-nigh discouraged pastor could have been gifted with supernatural and prophetic vision, and could have seen that resolve, and, looking ahead, the fruit that was to be borne from it, how would his anxious soul have thanked God and taken courage!
In this mood came Flossy to listen to the story of "The Parish of Fair Haven," as it flowed down to her in Mrs. Miller's smooth-toned musical voice. One who comes from her knees to listen is sure to find the seed if it has been put in. Flossy found hers.
Often in the course of her young life she had been at church and sat in the attitude of listener while a missionary sermon was preached. She had heard, perhaps, ten sentences from those sermons, not ten consecutive sentences, but words scattered here and there through the whole; from these she had gathered that there was to be a collection taken for the cause of Missions. Just where the money was to go, and just what was to be done with it when it arrived, what had been accomplished by missionary effort, what the Christian world was hoping for in that direction—all these things Flossy Shipley knew no more about than her kitten did.
Perhaps it was not strange then, that although abundantly supplied with pin-money, she had never in her life given anything to the work of Missions. Not that she would not willingly have deposited some of her money in the box for whatever use the authorities chose to make of it had she happened to have any; but young ladies as a rule have been educated to imagine that there is one day in the week in which their portmonnaies can be off duty. There being no shopping to be done, no worsteds to match, no confectionary to tempt what earthly use for money? So it was locked up at home. This, at least, is the way in which Flossy Shipley had argued, without knowing that she argued at all.
Now she was looking at things with new eyes; the same things that she had heard of hundreds of times, but how different they were! What a remarkable scheme it was, this carrying the story of Jesus to those miserable ignorant ones, getting them ready for the heaven that had been made ready for them! The people of "Fair Haven" did not appear to her like lunatics, as they did to Ruth Erskine. She was not, you will remember, of the class who had argued this question in their ignorance, and quieted their consciences with the foolish assertion that the church collections went to pay secretaries and treasurers and erect splendid public buildings. She belonged, rather, to that less hopeless class who had never thought at all. Now, as she listened, her eyes brightened with feeling and her cheeks glowed. The whole sublime romance of Missions was being mapped out to her on the face of that quaint allegory, and her heart responded warmly.
Curiously enough, her first throbs of conscience were not for herself but for her father. The portly gentleman who occasionally sat at the head of the Shipley pew, and who certainly never parted company with his pocket-book on Sabbath or on any other day, did he give liberally to Foreign Missions?
She could not determine as to the probabilities of the case. He was counted a liberal man—people liked to come to him to start subscriptions; but Flossy felt instinctively that a subscription paper with her father's name leading it was different, someway, from a quiet, baize-lined box, and no noise nor words. She doubted whether the cause had been materially helped by him.
She lost some sentences of the story while she planned ways for interesting her father and securing liberal donations from him; and then she was suddenly startled back to personality by hearing some astounding statements from the reader.
"It would be so easy to drop into a household box the price of an apple, or a paper, or a glass of peanuts, and yet who does it? Why, there are young ladies who will actually not give two cents a week from the money that they waste!"