Not a day of her life but she expected to be found out, to be disgraced before the school, perhaps to be expelled. Poor Susan! she is reaping now the result of her selfish lifetime ambition to be among the noted ones, to be thought of first, and treated like a heroine! Ambition is a very laudable thing; we should all try to do our best, but never should it lead us into doing 220 selfish, mean, dishonorable things; then it becomes a sin and not a virtue.
It was the weakness, nay, something worse, in Susan’s character, as we all know, always leading her into trouble, because it was so wholly selfish.
If Marion could have reasoned all this out as we can, she would have had fewer compunctions of conscience as she sat holding her mother’s letter in her hand, thinking over its contents.
It was some time before she could fully enjoy all the items of family news it contained. Then they drew her pleasantly back to the dear home, the small parish, and the life-long friends she had left there.
Gladys had been watching her as she read the letter, amused and interested by the different phases of feeling her face showed; when she saw her fold it up, she asked,—
“What’s happened, Marion? You’ve looked as if you had been at a funeral, and then at a wedding, while you were reading it.”
“I have—almost,” and Marion could laugh now. “Let me read you the last part of it; it is so like home.”
Then Marion read them about the children’s sum, and the parishioners’ kindness; and Gladys, as she listened, planned how she could help Marion without her ever suspecting from whence the help came, and Dorothy thought what a different home it must be from that she had left at Rock Cove.
Marion, instead of studying her next lesson, as it 221 was obviously her duty to do, sat with her book open before her, wondering how she could immediately enter upon a course of conduct that would give her a more enlarged and prominent religious influence. Never once suspecting that this was a way the tempter was taking to lead her from the true self-abnegation which is so vital to a growing Christian character. Single-eyed to God’s glory!
Miss Ashton in the recitation looked at her inquiringly several times. What could have happened, she wondered, to make Marion blunder so? She was generally prompt, and, considering how much she had to do to keep up with her class, correct; but to-day she seemed distraught, as if her mind were anywhere but upon her recitation. She stopped her after the lesson was finished, and asked her if she were sick; but Marion was well, nor was she, in her preoccupation, aware that Miss Ashton was not pleased.