"Worth anything!" repeated Linnet, puzzled.

"Doesn't God care for the other part?" questioned the child. "I've got to
have a good deal of the other part."

"So have all unmarried people," said her mother, smiling at the quaint
gravity of Marjorie's eyes.

"Then I don't see why--" said Marjorie.

"Perhaps you will by and by," her mother replied, laughing, for Marjorie
was looking as wise as an owl; "and now, please hurry with the apples,
for they must bake before tea. Mr. Woodfern says he never ate baked apple
sauce anywhere else."

Marjorie hoped he would not stay a whole week, as he proposed, if she had
to cut the apples. And then, with a shock and revulsion at herself, she
remembered that her father had read at worship that morning something
about giving even a cup of cold water to a disciple for Christ's sake.

Linnet laughed again as she stooped to pick up the doubtful _O_ and
crooked _S_ from the oilcloth.

But the letters had given Marjorie something to think about.

I had decided to hasten over the story of Marjorie's childhood and bring
her into her joyous and promising girlhood, but the child's own words
about the "other part" that she must have a "good deal" of have changed
my mind. Surely God does care for the "other part," too.

And I wonder what it is in you (do you know?) that inclines you to hurry
along and skip a little now and then, that you may discover whether
Marjorie ever married Hollis? Why can't you wait and take her life as
patiently as she did?

That same Saturday evening Marjorie's mother said to Marjorie's father,
with a look of perplexity upon her face,

"Father, I don't know what to make of our Marjorie."

He was half dozing over the _Agriculturist_; he raised his head and asked
sharply, "Why? What has she done now?"

Everybody knew that Marjorie was the apple of her father's eye.

"Nothing new! Only everything she does _is_ new. She is two Marjories,
and that's what I can't make out. She is silent and she is talkative;
she is shy, very shy, and she is as bold as a little lion; sometimes she
won't tell you anything, and sometimes she tells you everything;
sometimes I think she doesn't love me, and again she loves me to death;
sometimes I think she isn't as bright as other girls, and then again I'm
sure she is a genius. Now Linnet is always the same; I always know what
she will do and say; but there's no telling about Marjorie. I don't know
what to make of her," she sighed.