"The name of Christ is good here to-day, Endecott."
"How good! how precious!" was his quick rejoinder. "And how very precious too, is the love of his will!"—and he repeated softly, as if half thinking it out—
"'I worship thee, sweet will of God!
And all thy ways adore!
And every day I live, I seem
To love thee more and more.'"
An earnest, somewhat wistful glance of Faith's eye was the answer; it was not a dissenting answer, but it went back to Johnny. Her lip was a child's lip in its humbleness.
"It was very hard for me to give him up at first—" Mr. Linden went on softly; and the voice said it was yet; "but that answers all questions. 'The good Husbandman may pluck his roses, and gather in his lilies at mid-summer, and, for aught I dare say, in the beginning of the first summer month.'"—
Faith looked at the little human flower in her arms—and was silent.
"Reuben was telling me yesterday—" she said after a few minutes,—"what you have been to him."
But her words touched sweet and bitter things—Mr. Linden did not immediately answer,—his head drooped a little on his hand, and he did not raise it again until Johnny claimed his attention.
The quiet rest of the little sleeper was passing off,—changing into an unquiet waking; not with the fear of yesterday but with a restlessness of discomfort that was not easily soothed. Words and caresses seemed to have lost their quieting power for the time, though the child's face never failed to answer them; but he presently held out his arms to Mr. Linden, with the words, "Walk—like last night."
And for a while then Faith had nothing to do but to look and listen; to listen to the soft measured steps through the room, to watch the soothing, resting effect of the motion on the sick child, as wrapped in Mr. Linden's arms he was carried to and fro. She could tell how it wrought from the quieter, unbent muscles—from the words which by degrees Johnny began to speak. But after a while, one of these words was, "Sing."—Mr. Linden did not stay his walk, but though his tone was almost as low as his foot-steps, Faith heard every word.