The pealing bell cut short an answer, if one had been intended. Miss Benedict was glad. She wanted no answer just then; she had planted her little seed, and hoped that it would take root and grow.
"She has a way of taking things for granted," said one of the group which moved out of the music-room, leaving Nettie to take her lesson. "How does she know that any of us are Christians?"
There was a moment's silence, then Mary Burton asked:
"Do you really suppose there is no difference between us and others? Can't we be told in any way?"
"I'm sure I don't know how. There hasn't been a communion service since she came here, and we don't any of us go to prayer meeting. They say she does. Father said she sat in one corner of that dark old church the other night; the first woman there, and not many came afterward."
Said Mary Burton:
"I wonder what it means, any way, to come out from among them and be separate? I came across that verse in my reading the other night, and I wondered, then, just what it meant. We girls are certainly not any more 'separate' since we joined the church than we were before, so far as I know; and yet the verse some way made me think of Miss Benedict; she seems different from other Christians. I should like to know just what made the difference?"
"She is 'gooder,'" said Ruth Jennings, laughing a little, "that is just the whole of it; but I wish she hadn't started out on this idea about the Ansteds. They won't join us, and I don't want to feel myself humiliated by asking them."
But Nettie, usually easy to be turned aside, held persistently to the thought which troubled her.
"I know she is 'gooder,' that is what I say; but ought not we to be the same? Ought the boys and girls with whom we five spend so much time, to feel that we just belong to their set, and are in no sense different from them? We are all the church-members there are among the young people, you know. When I told Miss Benedict that the other day, she looked astonished for a minute, and then she said: 'You dear girls, what a work you have to do!' But I don't feel as though we were doing it, and I, for one, don't know how; but I wish I did."