"How much your father has done for us this winter!" and she looked directly at Claire Benedict. Didn't Mary remember that the dear father was dead?
But Miss Benedict understood. Her eyes which had remained bright with excitement until then, suddenly dimmed; but her smile and her voice were very sweet.
"Oh, Mary! thank you!" was all she said.
Among the workers it would have been hard to find one more faithful or more energetic than Bud. He was full of eager, happy life. Much depended upon him. He could blacken stoves with the skill of a professional, and none were ever more vigorously rubbed than those rusty, ash-be-strewn ones which had so long disgraced the church. It had been good for Bud to have others awaken to the fact that there were certain things which he could do, and do well.
An eventful winter this was to him. Having made an actual start toward Jerusalem, it was found that he put more energy into the journey than many who had been long on the way; and, as a matter of course, before long it became apparent that he was taking rapid strides.
Miss Alice Ansted was among the first to realize it. She came to Claire one evening with embarrassed laughter, and a half-serious, half-amused request for instruction:
"I'm trying to follow out some of your hints, and they are getting me into more trouble than anything I ever undertook. Sewing societies and charity parties are as nothing in comparison. I am trying to teach Bud! He wants to study arithmetic; it is an absurd idea, I think; what will he ever want of arithmetic? But he was determined, and you were determined, and between you I have been foolish enough to undertake it, and now it appears that arithmetic is a very small portion of what he wants to learn. He wants to know everything that there is in the Bible; and where church-members get their ideas about all sorts of things, and what the ministers study in the theological seminary, and why all the people in the world don't attend prayer-meeting, and I don't know what not! He acts as though his brain had been under a paralysis all his life, which had just been removed. I must say he astonishes me with his questions; but it is easier to ask questions than it is to answer them. What, for instance, am I to say to ideas like these? Since you have gotten me into this scrape, it is no more than fair that you should help me to see daylight."
And then would follow a discussion, nearly always pertaining to some of the practical truths of the Christian life, or to some direction that Bud had found in the course of his daily Bible verse, which seemed to him at variance with the life which was being lived by the professing Christians about him, and which he turned to his arithmetic-teacher to reconcile.
Bud, being ignorant, found it impossible to understand why people who professed to take the Bible for their rule of life, did not follow its teachings, and he brought each fresh problem to Alice Ansted with such confident expectation that she knew all about it, that she, who had only volunteered to explain to him the rules of arithmetic, was in daily embarrassment. From these conversations, which constantly grew more close and searching as Bud stumbled on new verses, Claire Benedict used to turn with a smile of satisfaction, as well as with almost a feeling of awe, over the wisdom of the Great Teacher. Alice Ansted might be teaching Bud the principles of arithmetic, but he was certainly daily teaching her the principles of the religion which she professed, but did not live.