duty, and it was enough; only she
had been all wrong and astray, and in confusion. There was a time for
everything, only her times and thoughts would mix themselves up and
interfere. Perhaps she was very weak-minded, and the only way for her
would be to give it all up, and wear drab, or whatever else might be
most unbecoming, and be fiercely severe, mortifying the flesh. She got
over that--her young nature reacting--as they all walked up the street
together, while the sun shone down smilingly upon the world in Sunday
best, and the flowers were gay in the door-yards, and Miss Milliken's
shop was reverential with the green shutters before the windows that
had been gorgeous yesterday with bright ribbons and fresh fashions; and
there was something thankful in her feeling of the pleasantness that was
about her, and a certainty that she should only grow morose if she took
to resisting it all. She would be as good as she could, and let the
pleasantness and the prettiness come "by the way." Yes, that was just
what Cousin Delight had said. "All these things shall be added,"--was
not that the Gospel word? So her troubling thought was laid for the
hour; but it should come up again. It was in the "seeking first" that
the question lay. By and by she would go back of the other to this, and
see clearer,--in the light, perhaps, of something that had been already
given her, and which, as she lived on toward a fuller readiness for it,
should be "brought to her remembrance."

Monday brought the perfection of a traveler's morning. There had been a
shower during the night, and the highways lay cool, moist, and dark
brown between the green of the fields and the clean-washed, red-brick
pavements of the town. There would be no dust even on the railroad, and
the air was an impalpable draught of delight. To the three young girls,
standing there under the station portico,--for they chose the smell of
the morning rather than the odors of apples and cakes and
indescribables which go to make up the distinctive atmosphere of a
railway waiting-room,--there was but one thing to be done to-day in the
world; one thing for which the sun rose, and wheeled himself toward that
point in the heavens which would make eight o'clock down below. Of all
the ships that might sail this day out of harbors, or the trains that
might steam out of cities across States, they recked nothing but of this
that was to take them toward the hills. There were unfortunates,
doubtle