“I am going to my room,” Ruth said presently. “Judge Burnham, I will hasten, and be ready to go down town with you in a very little while. Susan, will you come with me, please? I want to talk to you.”
And Susan arose with alacrity, a pleasant smile lighting her plain face. There was a sound of sisterliness in the tone, which she had watched and waited for, but rarely heard.
“I have come on the strangest errand,” Ruth said, dropping into her own favorite chair, as the door of her old room closed after them. “I feel as if I were at least a year older than I was yesterday. I have thought so much. First of all, Susan, I want to tell you something. I have found something. I have come close to Jesus—I mean he has come close to me. He has almost shown me himself. I don’t know how to tell you about it, and indeed I am not sure that there is anything to tell. But it is a great deal to have experienced. I seem to have heard him say, ‘Come to me. Why do you struggle and plan and toss yourself about? Haven’t I promised you rest?’ And, Susan, I do believe he spoke to my heart; why not?”
“Why not, indeed!” said Susan, “when he has repeated the message so many times. Ruth, I am so glad!”
Then Ruth ran rapidly from that subject to less important ones, giving her sister a picture, in brief, of the new home, closing with the sentence:
“Now I am in a dilemma. I can’t keep any of the Ferris family for an hour, and I can’t introduce new servants until things are in different shape, and I can’t get them into different shape until I have help. Do you see what I am to do?”
“Yes,” said Susan, with a bright smile, “you need a sister; one who knows how to help in all household matters, and yet who knows how to keep her tongue reasonably quiet as to what she found. I know how servants gossip, some of them. That Rosie we had for a week tried to tell me things about Mrs. Dr. Blakeman’s kitchen that would make her feel like fainting if she knew it. A sister is just exactly what you need in this emergency. Will you let her step into the gap and show you how nicely she can fill it?”
“Will you?” Ruth asked, eagerly. “That is just exactly what I wanted to say, though I didn’t like to say it, for fear you would misunderstand, not realize, you know, that it is because we don’t want to go out of the family for assistance just now that we needed you so much.”
Recognized at last in words as a member of the family! An unpremeditated sentence, evidently from the heart. It was what Susan Erskine had been patiently biding her time and waiting for. It had come sooner than she expected. It made her cheeks glow.
“I will go home with you at once,” she said, in a business-like way. “There is nothing to hinder. The machinery of this house is in running order again. That new second girl is a treasure, Ruth, and, by the way, she has a sister who might develop into a treasure for you. Now let me see if I understand things. What do you want to do first?”