names, or their homes, or their lives. She had
no sort of idea of the temptations by which they were surrounded, nor
what they needed. Perhaps this very fact removed all touch of patronage
from her tone; as, when the bell rang, she found, to her great
surprise, that the lesson hour was over, she turned back to them for a
moment and said with that sparkling little smile of hers:

"I'm real sorry you hadn't a teacher to-day. I should have been glad to
have taught the lesson if I had known how; but you see how it is; I have
all these things to learn."

"Now, Rich. Johnson rather prided himself on his rudeness; a strange
thing to pride one's self on, to be sure. But pride takes all sorts of
curious forms, and he had actually rather gloried in his ability to say
rude and cutting things at a moment's notice; words, you know, that the
boys in his set called 'cute.' But he was at this time actually
surprised into being almost gallant.

"We never had a better teacher," he said, quickly. "If you are only just
learning you better try it again on us; we like the style enough sight
better than the finished up kind."

And then Flossy smiled again, and thanked them, and said she had enjoyed
it. And then she did an unprecedented thing. She invited them all to
call on her, in a pretty, graceful way, precisely as she would have
invited a gentleman friend who had seen her home from a concert, the
quiet, courteous invitation to her father's house, which is a mere
matter of form among the young ladies of her set, but which to these
boys was as astonishing as an invitation to the Garden of Eden.

They had not the slightest intention of accepting the invitation, but
they felt, without realizing what made them feel so, a sudden added
touch of self-respect. I almost think they were more careful of their
words during the rest of that day than they would have been but for that
invitation.

"Isn't Sunday-school splendid?" Flossy said to Ruth Erskine, as, with
her cheeks in a fine glow of glad satisfaction that she had "begun," she
joined Ruth in the hall.

"It was very interesting," said Ruth, in her more quiet, thoughtful way.
She was thoughtful during the entire walk home.

It was her lot to slip into one of those grand classes where Bible
teaching means something more than simply reading over the verses. There
had been good seed sown with a lavish hand, and there had been careful
probing to see if it had taken root. Ruth had some stron