ir up beside her, and given her a
long, quiet look straight in the eyes.

"It was late for you to be out in the storm, my dear, and alone."

"I'd been out a good while. I had been on--the track," said Sharley,
with a slight shiver. "I think I could not have been exactly well. I
would not go again. I must go home now. But oh"--her voice sinking--"I
wish nobody had found me, I wish nobody had found me! The snow would
have covered me up, you see."

She started up flushing hot and frightened. What had she been saying to
Halcombe's mother?

But Halcombe's mother put her healthy soft hand down on the girl's shut
fingers. Women understand each other in flashes.

"My dear," she said, without prelude or apology, "I have a thing to say
to you. God does not give us our troubles to think about; that's all. I
have lived more years than you. I know that He never gives us our
troubles to think about."

"I don't know who's going to think about them if we don't!" said
Sharley, half aggrieved.

"Supposing nobody thinks of them, where's the harm done? Mark my words,
child: He sends them to drive us out of ourselves,--to _drive_ us out.
He had much rather we would go of our own accord, but if we won't go we
must be sent, for go we must. That's just about what we're put into this
world for, and we're not fit to go out of it till we have found this
out."

Now the moralities of conversation were apt to glide off from Sharley
like rain-drops from gutta-percha, and I cannot assert that these words
would have made profound impression upon her had not Halcombe Dike's
mother happened to say them.

Be that as it may, she certainly took them home with her, and pondered
them in her heart; pondered till late in her feverish, sleepless night,
till her pillow grew wet, and her heart grew still. About midnight she
jumped out into the cold, and kneeled, with her face hidden in the bed.

"O, I've been a naughty girl!" she said, just as she might have said it
ten years ago. She felt so small, and ignorant, and weak that night.

Out of such smallness, and ignorance, and weakness great knowledge and
strength may have beautiful growth. They came in time to Sharley, but it
was a long, slow time. Moppet was just as unendurable, the baby just as
fretful, life just as joyless, as if she had taken no new outlook upon
it, made no new, tearful plans about it.

"Calico! calico!" she cried out a dozen times a day; "nothing _but_
calico!"

But by and by