ored than even when George
Turnbull plagued her with his vulgar attentions. When she got out at
last, sedate as she was, she could hardly help skipping along the
street by her father's side. Far better than chapel was their nice
little cold dinner together, in their only sitting-room, redolent of
the multifarious goods piled around it on all the rest of the floor.
Greater yet was the following pleasure--of making her father lie down
on the sofa, and reading him to sleep, after which she would doze a
little herself, and dream a little, in the great chair that had been
her grandmother's. Then they had their tea, and then her father always
went to see the minister before chapel in the evening.

When he was gone, Mary would put on her pretty straw bonnet, and set
out to visit Letty Lovel at Thornwick. Some of the church-members
thought this habit of taking a walk, instead of going again to the
chapel, very worldly, and did not scruple to let her know their
opinion; but, so long as her father was satisfied with her, Mary did
not care a straw for the world besides. She was too much occupied with
obedience to trouble her head about opinion, either her own or other
people's. Not until a question comes puzzling and troubling us so as to
paralyze the energy of our obedience is there any necessity for its
solution, or any probability of finding a real one. A thousand foolish
_doctrines_ may lie unquestioned in the mind, and never interfere with
the growth or bliss of him who lives in active subordination of his
life to the law of life: obedience will in time exorcise them, like
many another worse devil.

It had drizzled all the morning from the clouds as well as from the
pulpit, but, just as Mary stepped out of the kitchen-door, the sun
stepped out of the last rain-cloud. She walked quickly from the town,
eager for the fields and the trees, but in some dread of finding Tom
Helmer at the stile; for he was such a fool, she said to herself, that
there was no knowing what he might do, for all she had said; but he had
thought better of it, and she was soon crossing meadows and cornfields
in peace, by a path which, with many a winding, and many an up and
down, was the nearest way to Thornwick.

The saints of old did well to pray God to lift on them the light of his
countenance: has the Christian of the new time learned of his Master
that the clouds and the sunshine come and go of themselves? If the
sunshine fills the hearts of old me