stions of it,
and mixed them up with her own doubts and unsatisfactions which they
could not answer.

"The world is full of mistakes; mistakes centuries long; but it is
full of salvation and setting to rights, also. 'The kingdom of
heaven is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal
till the whole was leavened.' You have been _allowed_ to be, Desire
Ledwith. And so was the man that was born blind. And I think there
is a colon put into the sentence about him, where a comma was meant
to be."

Desire did not ask him, then, what he meant; but she turned to the
story after he had gone, and found this:--

"Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works
of God should be manifest in him."

You can see, if you look also, where she took the colon out, and put
the comma in.

Were all the mistakes--the sins, even--for the very sake of the pure
blessedness and the more perfect knowledge of the setting right?

Desire began to think that Uncle Oldways' theology might help her.

What she said to him now was,--

"I want to do something. I should like to go and live with
Luclarion, I think, down there in Neighbor Street. I should like to
take hold of some other lives,--little children's, perhaps,"--and
here Desire's voice softened,--"that don't seem to have any business
to be, either, and see if I could help or straighten anything. Then
I feel is if I should know."

"Then--according to the Scripture--you _would_ know. But--that's
undertaking a good deal. Luclarion Grapp has got there; but she has
been fifty-odd years upon the road. And she has been doing real
things all the time. That's what has brought her there. You can't
boss the world's hard jobs till you've been a journeyman at the easy
ones."

"And I've missed my apprenticeship!" said Desire, with changed voice
and face, falling back into her disheartenment again.

"No!" Uncle Oldways almost shouted. "Not if you come to the Master
who takes in the eleventh hour workers. And it isn't the eleventh
hour with you,--_child_!"

He dwelt on that word "child," reminding her of her short mistaking
and of the long retrieval. Her nineteen years and the forever and
ever contrasted themselves before her suddenly, in the light of
hope.

She turned sharply, though, to look at her duty. Her journeyman's
duty of easy things.

"Must I go to Europe with my mother?" she asked again, the
conversation coming round to just that with which it had begu