"It certainly isn't her tent," Eurie said, trying to keep down the desire to laugh, "and I haven't the least idea where she is. I should be glad to give her your message if I could, but I never saw the lady in my life, and have no reason to expect that pleasure."
Whereupon her questioner laughed outright.
"That is a dilemma," he said. "I appreciate your feelings, for I am precisely in the same position; but the lady was described minutely to me, and I certainly thought I had found her. I am sorry to have interrupted you," and he bowed himself away.
A new curiosity seized upon Eurie—the desire to see Miss Rider. "She must be one of them," she soliloquized, falling into Flossy's way of speaking of the workers at Chautauqua. "He said she was wanted for a consultation. I wonder if she can be one of those who are to take part in the primary exercises? She must be young for such prominent work if she looks like me; but how could he know that since he never saw her? It is very evident that I am to go to Sunday-school next Sabbath anyhow, if I never did before, for now I have two items of interest to look up—a lesson that is in the 'fifth chapter, from the fifth to the fifteenth verse of something,' and a being called 'Miss Rider.'" So thinking she hastily concluded and folded her letter, ready for the afternoon mail, without a thought or care as to the seed that she had been sending away in it, or as to the fruit it might bear; without the slightest insight into the way she was being led through seeming mistakes and accidents up to a point that was to influence all her future.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE NEW LESSON.
Eurie turned her pillow, thumped the scant feathers into little heaps, and gave a dismal groan as she laid her head back on it.
"It is very queer," she said, "that as soon as ever I make up my mind to be orthodox, and go to meeting every time the bell rings, I should be dumped into a heap on this hard bed with the headache. I haven't had a touch of it before."
"'The way of transgressors is hard,'" quoted Marion, going on calmly with her writing. "If you hadn't taken that horrid tramp yesterday instead of going to meeting like a Christian, you would have been all right to-day."
"I believe you sit up nights to read your Bible, so as to have verses to fling at people who are overtaken in any possible trial or inconvenience. You always have them ready. Didn't you bring it with you, and don't you prepare a list for each day's use?" This was Eurie's half merry, half petulant reply to the Bible verse that had been "flung" at her.