ect. The thought lingered with her. She looked over
her list of friends; there was always those three girls, growing dearer
by every day of association; yet their lives necessarily ran much apart;
it would naturally grow more and more so as the future came to them.
Then, too, she was equally intimate with each of them; they were all
equally dear to her.

Now a woman can not have three friends who shall all fill that one place
in her heart which she finds. She thought of her home ties; strong they
certainly were; growing stronger every day. There were few things that
she did not feel willing to do for her father; but the one thing that he
wanted just now was that she should marry Col. Baker; she could not do
that even to please him.

He would recover from that state of feeling, of course; but would not
other kindred states of feeling constantly arise, both with him and with
her mother? Could she not foresee a constant difference of opinion on
almost every imaginable topic? Then there was her sister Kitty. Could
any two lives run more widely apart than hers and Kitty's were likely
to? Had they a single taste in common?

As for Charlie, Flossy turned from that subject; it was too sore and too
tender a spot to be probed. She trembled for Charlie; he was walking in
slippery places; the descent was growing easier; she felt that rather
than saw it; and, she felt, too, that his friend Col. Baker was the
leader; and she felt, too, that her intimacy with Col. Baker had greatly
strengthened his.

No wonder that the spot was a sore one. Grouping all these things
together and brooding over them, with no sound breaking the silence save
the ceaseless drip, drip of the rain, and the whirls of defiant wind,
sitting there in her loneliness, the large arm-chair in which she
crouched being drawn up before that glowing fire, is it any wonder that
the firelight revealed the fact that great silent tears were slowly
following each other down Flossy's round smooth cheek? She felt like a
pitiful, lonely, forsaken baby.

It was not that she was utterly miserable; she recognized even then the
thought that she had an almighty, everlasting, unchanging Friend. She
rejoiced even then at the thought, not as she might have rejoiced, not
as it was her privilege to do, but I mean she knew that all these
trials, and mistakes, and burdens, were but for a moment. She knew that
to-morrow, when the sun shone again, she would be able to come out from
behi