present difficulty?

"We must sell our furniture, mother!"

"For a quarter of what it's worth? Never, girl! No! The Lord will
provide," said she, between her clenched teeth, with a sort of hysteric
chuckle. "The Lord will provide!"

"I believe it; I believe it," said poor Grace; "but faith is weak, and
the day is very dark, mother."

"Dark, ay? And may be darker, yet; but the Lord will provide. He
prepares a table in the wilderness for his saints that the world don't
think of."

"Oh, mother! and do you think there is any door of hope?"

"Go to bed, girl; go to bed, and leave me to see to that. Find my
spectacles. Wherever have you laid them to, now? I'll look over the
books awhile."

"Do let me go over them for you."

"No, you sha'n't! I suppose you'll be wanting to make out your poor old
mother's been cheating somebody. Why not, if I'm a thief, Miss, eh?"

"Oh, mother! mother! don't say that again."

And Grace glided out meekly to her own chamber, which was on the
ground-floor adjoining the parlour, and there spent more than one hour
in prayer, from which no present comfort seemed to come; yet who shall
say that it was all unanswered?

At last her mother came upstairs, and put her head in angrily:--"Why
ben't you in bed, girl? sitting up this way?"

"I was praying, mother," says Grace, looking up as she knelt.

"Praying! What's the use of praying? and who'll hear you if you pray?
What you want's a husband, to keep you out of the workhouse; and you
won't get that by kneeling here. Get to bed, I say, or I'll pull you
up?"

Grace obeyed uncomplaining, but utterly shocked; though she was not
unacquainted with those frightful fits of morose unbelief, even of
fierce blasphemy, to which the excitable West-country mind is liable,
after having been over-strained by superstitious self-inspection, and by
the desperate attempt to prove itself right and safe from frames and
feelings, while fact and conscience proclaim it wrong.

The West-country people are apt to attribute these paroxysms to the
possession of a devil; and so did Grace that night.

Trembling with terror and loving pity, she lay down, and began to pray
afresh for that poor wild mother.

At last the fear crossed her that her mother might make away with
herself. But a few years before, another class-leader in Aberalva had
attempted to do so, and had all but succeeded. The thought was
intolerable. She must go to her; face reproaches, blows, anythi