"But you sing, and so sweetly too."
"Ah, one learns that at church; singing is part of one's religion," went on the girl reverently. "Nothing, however sordid and hard, can keep religion out of one's life; it is just there always. Slaves sing, you know, and blind chaffinches, and poor miners under-ground over their work. It keeps off bad thoughts. Oh, every one must sing," she finished with a smile, feeling that now for the first time in her young toil-worn life she was really resting on her oars.
Only resting for a brief space though; by-and-bye she must take them up again, and row on bravely, against the stream perhaps, through marshes of sedgy weeds, fighting against a sullen current, perhaps drifted into deeper waters, but always with the broad blue sky above her, with tints of silver-lined clouds and possible sunshine, with hopes of safe harborage by-and-bye.
"I help myself, and therefore God will help me," Queenie had often said to herself in her sorely-tried youth. "I am afraid of nothing but doing wrong, and seeing Emmie suffer; the rest I can bear;" and this belief in herself saved them both.
"I am going to take you to see all our celebrities," announced Cathy solemnly at the breakfast table the next morning. "It is Langley's district day, and she will have nothing to say to any of us until lunch time. I propose that we leave Emmie with Deborah to shell peas, while we do Hepshaw thoroughly."
"You must take me into the church first," observed Queenie, quite prepared for a long morning of delicious idleness, and in the true holiday spirit, alert and ready for any chance enjoyment. "I think there is something delightful in making acquaintance with a fresh place; even seeing fresh faces and hearing different voices gives me an odd indescribable sort of pleasure."
"You poor prisoner, yes," returned her friend sympathizingly, as they walked down the little garden path at the side of the house, and passed through the gate that opened on the churchyard, with its long terrace planted picturesquely with sycamores. "You are like a nun; you have only peeped at the world through a sort of invisible grating in Miss Titheridge's front parlor. You must make up for lost time, and live every moment thoroughly, as Garth and I do."
"That is just it; we don't half live our lives, we girls," replied Queenie dreamily; "half of us seem asleep; our faculties lie dormant, and get rusted just for want of use. Miss Titheridge hung round my neck like a mill-stone; she literally crushed and pulverized all the best parts of me. It is being born again; it is a sort of moral regeneration, this feeling of freedom, this—oh, how can I make you understand it all, Cathy!"
"Seeing is believing," was the brusque answer. "You are a different creature, my dear Madam Dignity; you were like the frond of my favorite prickly shield fern that I was watching yesterday. You were all there, you know, the greenness and the freshness; but one could not get at you, you were so tightly swathed and coiled up."
"Yes," returned Queenie joyously; "and now I have found myself, my own individuality. I do think, seriously, that I have a larger capacity for living than other people. I have good health, that is one thing; my constitution is perfect; then I love work, I really and literally do, Cathy. Work braces one, it brings all one's faculties into play; work is rest; inaction, idleness; pleasure for the sake of pleasure, is simply paralysis of one's higher life, it is premature old age."