"The line of G.o.d's battle with evil is very long, Miss Marsden. I think you can find the front in New York as truly as I in the West.

In this fight woman can often do as much as man. Won't you try?"

"I shall not promise you anything," she said. "You must wait and see."

They were now before the parsonage in the hamlet of Scrub Oaks. The sound of the bells brought Mrs. Dlimm's faded face to the window, and on recognizing them she clapped her hands for joy, as one of her own children might have done; and a moment later was smiling upon the little porch, the very embodiment of welcome.

CHAPTER XXIII.

A RATIONALIST OF THE OLD SCHOOL.

"I knew you would come," said Mrs. Dlimm, taking both of Lottie's hands with utter absence of formality. "Husband said I needn't look for you any more, but I felt it in my bones--no, my heart--that you would come. When I feel a thing is going to take place it always does. So you are here. I am very glad to see your--Mr. Hemstead--too.

This is splendid." And Mrs. Dlimm exultantly ushered Lottie into the room that, when last seen, was crowded with such a motley a.s.sembly. Hemstead meanwhile drove the horse to an adjacent shed.

"But he isn't my Mr. Hemstead," said Lottie, laughing.

"Well, it seems as if he were related, or belonged to you in some way. When I think of one, I can't help thinking of the other."

"O dear!" exclaimed Lottie, still laughing, blushing, and affecting comic alarm; "being joined together by a minister's wife is almost as bad as by the minister himself."

"Almost as good, you mean. You would have my congratulation rather than sympathy if you secured such a prince among men."

"How little you know about him, Mrs. Dlimm! He is going to be a poor, forlorn home missionary; and your husband's increased salary will be royal compared with his."

"He will never be forlorn; and how long will he be poor?"

--"All his life possibly."

"That's not very long. What will come after? What kind of a master is he serving?"

"Do you know," said Lottie, lowering her tone, and giving her chair a little confidential hitch toward the simple-hearted lady with whom formality and circ.u.mlocution were impossible, "that I am beginning to think about these things a great deal?"

"I don't wonder, my dear," said Mrs. Dlimm, with a little sigh of satisfaction. "No one could help thinking about him who saw his manly courtesy and tact the evening you were here."

"O, no," said Lottie, blushing still more deeply; "I did not mean that. Please understand me. Mr. Hemstead is only a chance acquaintance that I have met while visiting my aunt, Mrs. Marchmont. I mean that when I was here last I was a very naughty girl, but I have since been thinking how I could be a better one. Indeed, I should like to be a Christian, as you are."

In a moment the little lady was all tender solicitude. She was one who believed in conversion; and, to her, being converted was the greatest event of life.

But just then Hemstead entered, and she had enough natural, womanly interest--not curiosity--to note the unconscious welcome of Lottie's eyes, and the quick color come and go in her face, as if a fire were burning in her heart and throwing its flickering light upon her fair features.

"Chance acquaintance, indeed!" she thought. "Why, here is this city-bred girl blushing as I once did about Mr. Dlimm. Whether she knows it or not, her blushes must tell the same story as mine."

But though Mrs. Dlimm was so unconventional, she had tact, and turned the conversation to the subject of the donation party.

"See here," she exclaimed exultantly, tugging a bulky commentary; "this is one of the results of your coming the other evening. Mr.

Dlimm has been wanting this book a long time, and now he pores over it so much that I am getting jealous."

"The opinions expressed in such a ponderous volume ought to have great weight, surely," said Hemstead, smiling.

"And do you know," she continued, in an aside to Lottie, "that each of the children has had a new warm winter suit? and, wonderful to tell, I have bought myself a dress right from the store, instead of making over something sent me by brother Abel's wife from New York."

Lottie's eyes moistened, and she said in half soliloquy, "I didn't know it was so nice and easy to make others happy."

"Ah! depend upon it, you are learning lots of things," said Mrs.

Dlimm, significantly. "When G.o.d begins to teach, then we do learn, and something worth knowing, too."

"I thought that G.o.d's lessons were very hard and painful," said Lottie to Hemstead, with a spice of mischief in her manner.

"Mrs. Dlimm is a better authority than I was," he replied. "Do you know," he continued, addressing their hostess, "that Miss Marsden has done more to teach me how to preach than all my years at the seminary?"

"Surely," exclaimed Mrs. Dlimm, "that's a rather strong statement.

I can understand how Miss Marsden can do a great deal for one. We have had very nice experience in that direction; but just how she should teach you more than all the grave professors and learned text-books is not clear at once."

"Well, she has," he maintained stoutly. "I doubt whether your husband gets as much light upon the Bible from that huge commentary there as Miss Marsden gave me in one afternoon."

Mrs. Dlimm turned her eyes inquiringly toward Lottie, who said, laughingly, "It would seem, last week, that I was a heathen and Mr. Hemstead a heretic."

"And what are you now?"

"O, he's all right now."

"And not you?"

"I fear I shall always be a little crooked; but I hope I am not exactly a heathen any longer."

"Miss Marsden was a heathen, as Nathanael was a shrewd and dishonest Jew," said Hemstead.

"What kind of a Jew was Nathanael?" asked Lottie, innocently.

"Christ said, when he first saw him," replied Mrs. Dlimm, smiling, "'Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.'"

Then both were puzzled at Lottie's sudden and painful flush, but they ascribed it to her modesty; and Hemstead, to give her time to recover herself, gave a brief sketch of his sermon, and how, in the afternoon, while reading, at Lottie's suggestion, the complete story of Lazarus, they both had seen the unspeakable sympathy of Christ for those He sought to save.

"O dear!" thought Lottie, "when shall I escape the consequences of my foolish jest? 'Without guile,' indeed!"

Mr. Dlimm now appeared, and he and Hemstead were soon discussing the rendering of an obscure pa.s.sage, upon which the big commentary gave the conflicting opinions of a dozen learned doctors. Mrs.

Dlimm carried Lottie off to her sanctum, the nursery,--the fruitful source of questions and mysteries the learned doctors would find still more difficult to solve.

"And you are contented with this narrow round of life?" asked Lottie, curiously, as Mrs. Dlimm finished the narration of what seemed to her very tame experience.