ss them with, unnecessary obligations, I
will ask you not to help them to the identification of its source."

She straightened out the letter and folded it, put it in her pocket and
returned home. Another letter was waiting for her there. It was from the
parson:

"So you sent us a Christmas-box after all! That was just like my runaway,
all innocent acting and make-believe. What joy we had of it!--Rachel and
myself, I mean, for we had to carry on the fiction that Aunt Anna knew
nothing about it, she being vexed at the thought of our spendthrift
spending so much money. Chalse brought it into the parlour while Anna was
upstairs, and it might have been the ark going up to Jerusalem it entered
in such solemn stillness. Oh, dear! oh, dear! The bun-loaf, and the
almonds, and the cheese, and the turkey, and the pound of tobacco, and
the mull of snuff! On account of Anna everything had to be conducted in
great quietness, but it was a terrible leaky sort of silence, I fear, and
there were hot and hissing whispers. God bless you for your thought and
care of us! Coming so timely, it is like my dear one herself, a gift that
cometh from the Lord; and when people ask me if I am not afraid that my
granddaughter should be all alone in that great and wicked Babylon, I
tell them: 'No; you don't know my Glory; she is all courage and nerve and
power, a perfect bow of steel, quivering with sympathy and strength.'"

IX.

Christmas had come and gone at the Brotherhood, and yet the project was
unfulfilled. John himself had delayed its fulfilment from one trivial
cause after another. The night was too dark or not dark enough; the moon
shone or was not shining. His real obstacle was his superstitious fear.
The scheme was very easy of execution, and the Father himself had made it
so. This, and the Father's trust in him, had almost wrecked the
enterprise. Only his own secret anxieties, which were interpreted to his
consciousness by the sight of Brother Paul's wasting face, sufficed to
sustain his purpose.

"The man's dying. It can not be unpleasing to God."

He said this to himself again and again, as one presses the pain in one's
side to make sure it is still there. Under the shadow of the crisis his
character was going to ruin. He grew cunning and hypocritical, and could
do nothing that was not false in reality or appearance. When the Father
passed him he would drop his head, and it was taken for contrition, and
he was commended f