ou heart-sound
creature!" said Mrs. Barclay, with again a caressing, admiring touch of
Lois's brow.

"O, but indeed I have. Not in need like yours--I have never touched
_that_--I never felt like that; but in other need, as great and as
terrible. And I know, and everybody else who has ever tried knows, that
the Lord keeps his word."

"How have you tried?" Mrs. Barclay asked abstractedly.

"I needed the forgiveness of sin," said Lois, letting her voice fall a
little, "and deliverance from it."

"_You!_" said Mrs. Barclay.

"I was as unhappy as anybody could be till I got it."

"When was that?"

"Four years ago."

"Are you much different now from what you were before?"

"Entirely."

"I cannot imagine you in need of forgiveness. What had you done?"

"I had done nothing whatever that I ought to have done. I loved only
myself,--I mean _first_,--and lived only to myself and my own pleasure,
and did my own will."

"Whose will do you now? your grandmother's?"

"Not grandmother's first. I do God's will, as far as I know it."

"And therefore you think you are forgiven?"

"I don't _think_, I know," said Lois, with a quick breath. "And it is
not 'therefore' at all; it is because I am covered, or my sin is, with
the blood of Christ. And I love him; and he makes me happy."

"It is easy to make you happy, dear. To me there is nothing left in the
world, nor the possibility of anything. That wind is singing a dirge in
my ears; and it sweeps over a desert. A desert where nothing green will
grow any more!"

The words were spoken very calmly; there was no emotion visible that
either threatened or promised tears; a dull, matter-of-fact, perfectly
clear and quiet utterance, that almost broke Lois's heart. The water
that was denied to the other eyes sprang to her own.

"It was in the wilderness that the people were fed with manna," she
said, with a great gush of feeling in both heart and voice. "It was
when they were starving and had no food, just then, that they got the
bread from heaven."

"Manna does not fall now-a-days," said Mrs. Barclay with a faint smile.

"O yes, it does! There is your mistake, because you do not know. It
_does_ come. Look here, Mrs. Barclay--"

She sprang up, went for a Bible which lay on one of the tables, and,
dropping on her knees again by Mrs. Barclay's side, showed her an open
page.

"Look here--'I am the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never
hunger; and he that believeth o