"Oh, how can we know every thing to do at the first?"

"How could David have known? Now he had found the right way to do the right thing. 'So the priests and the Levites sanctified themselves to bring up the Ark of the Lord G.o.d of Israel. And the children of the Levites bare the Ark of G.o.d upon their shoulders with the staves thereon as Moses commanded, according to the word of the Lord. And David spake to the chief of the Levites to appoint their brethren to be the singers with instruments of music, psalteries and harps and cymbals, sounding, by lifting up the voice with joy. So David, and the elders of Israel, and the captains over thousands, went to bring up the Ark of the covenant of the Lord out of the house of Obed-edom with joy.'"

"He was not afraid now," said Tessa. "I think that he was all the more joyful because he had been so humiliated and afraid. I will think about that new cart."

"And those three months in which he was finding out the will of G.o.d.

'And it came to pa.s.s, when G.o.d helped the Levites that bare the Ark of the covenant of the Lord that they offered seven bullocks and seven rams.' He could not help them the first time because their way was not according to His law; their joy, their thankfulness, their sincerity, their carefulness availed them nothing because they kept not His law.

Uzza was a priest and should have known the law; David was king and he should have known the law."

"But he had his second opportunity, despite his mistake."

"And so, if your desire be according to His will may you have yours; it may be months or years, half your lifetime, but if you study His word and ask for your second opportunity through the intercession of Christ, I am sure that you will have it."

"Sometimes I am angry, sometimes bewildered, sometimes there is hatred in my heart because I have been deceived and humiliated-sometimes I do not want it back-"

"My dear," said Miss Jewett, gravely, "discipline is better than our heart's desire."

"Is it? I don't like to think so."

When the clock in the church-tower struck midnight Tessa lay awake wondering if she could ever choose discipline before any heart's desire.

Then she crept closer to Miss Jewett and kissed her.

VII.-THE LONG DAY.

With the apple blossoms came Tessa's birthday. She had lived twenty-five years up-stairs and down-stairs in that white house with the lilac shrubbery and low iron fence. Twenty-five years with her father and mother, nineteen with her little sister, and almost as many with her old friend, Mr. Hammerton; twenty years with Laura and Felix and Miss Jewett, and not quite three years with the latest friend, the latest and the one that she had most believed in, Ralph Towne.

She was counting these years and these friends as she brushed out her long, light hair and looked into the reflection of the fair, bright, thoughtful face that had come to another birthday.

Nothing would ever happen to her again, she was sure; nothing ever did happen after one were as old as twenty-five. In novels, all the wonderful events occurred in earlier life, and then-a blank or bliss or misery, any thing that the reader might guess.

Would her life henceforth be a blank because she was so old and was growing older?

In one of her stories, Miss Mulock had stated that the experience of love had been given to her heroine "later than to most" and _she_ was twenty-four!

"Not that that experience is all one's life," she mused; "but it is just as much to me as it is to any man or woman that ever lived; as much as to Cornelia, the matron with her jewels, or Vittoria Colonna, or Mrs.

Browning, or Hypatia,-if she ever loved any body,-or Miss Jewett,-if she ever did,-or Sue Greyson, or Queen Victoria, or Ralph Towne's mother! I wonder if his father were like him, so handsome and gentle. I have a right to the pain and the blessedness of loving; perhaps I _have_ been in love-perhaps I am now! He shut the door that he had opened and he has gone out; I would not recall him if I could do it with one breath-

"'No harm from him can come to me On ocean or on sh.o.r.e.'

"Well," smiling into the sympathetic eyes, "if nothing new ever happen to me, I'll find out all the blessedness of the old."

For she must always find something to be glad of before she could be sorrowful about any thing.

She ran down-stairs in her airiest mood to be congratulated by her father in a humorous speech that ended with an unfinished sentence and a quick turning of the head, to be squeezed and hugged and kissed by Dinah, and dubbed Miss Twenty-Five, and then to have her mood changed, all in the past made dreary, and all in the future desolate, by one of her mother's harangues.

Mr. Wadsworth had kissed his three girls and hurried off to his business, as he had done in all the years that Tessa could remember; Dinah had pushed her plate away and was leaning forward with her elbows on the table-cloth, her face alight with the mischief of teasing Tessa about being "stricken in years." Tessa's repartees were sending Dinah off into her little shouts of laughter when their mother's voice broke in:

"I had been married eight years when I was your age, Tessa."

"It will be nine years on my next birthday," said Tessa.

"Yes, just nine; for I was married on my seventeenth birthday; your father met me one day coming from school and said that he would call that evening; I curled my hair over and put on my garnet merino and waited for him an hour. I expected John Gesner, too. But your father came first and we set the wedding-day that night. I was seventeen and he was thirty-seven!"

"I congratulate you," said Tessa. "I congratulate the woman who married my father."

"Girls are so different," sighed Mrs. Wadsworth. "Now _I_ had two offers that year! Aunt Theresa wanted me to take John Gesner because he was two years younger than your father; but John was only a clerk in the Iron Works then, and so was Lewis. Lewis is just my age. How could I tell that he would make a fortune buying nails?"

"You would have hit the nail on the head if you had known it," laughed Dinah.

"And here's Dine, now, _she_ is like me. You are a Wadsworth through and through! Young men like some life about a girl; how many beaux Sue Greyson has! All you think of is education! There was Cliff Manning, you turned the cold shoulder to him because he couldn't talk grammar. What's grammar? Grammar won't make the pot boil."

"Enough of them would," suggested Dinah.

"Mr. Towne came and came till he was tired, I suppose. I hope you didn't refuse him."

"No, he refused me."

Her tone was so gravely in earnest that her mother was staggered. Dinah shouted.

Mrs. Wadsworth went on in a voice that was gathering indignation: "You may laugh now; you will not always laugh. 'He that will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay.' Mrs. Sherwood told me yesterday that she hoped to have Nan Gerard back here for good, and Mary looked as if it were all settled. Mr. Towne did not do much _last_ winter, Mary said, beside run around with Naughty Nan. I'm hearing all the time of somebody being married or engaged, and you are doing nothing but shilly-shally over some book or trotting around after poor folks with Miss Jewett."

"She will find a prince in a hovel some day," said Dinah. "He will be struck with her att.i.tude as she is choking some bed-ridden woman with beef-tea and fall down on his knees and propose on the spot. 'Feed me, seraph,' he will cry."

"He wouldn't talk grammar, or he couldn't spell or read Greek, and she will turn away," laughed Mrs. Wadsworth. "Tessa, you are none of my bringing up."

"That is true," replied Tessa, the sorrowfulness of the tone softening its curtness.

"You always _did_ care for something in a book more than for what I said! You never do any thing to please people; and yet, somehow, somebody always _is_ running after you. I wish that you _could_ go out into the world and get a little character; you are no more capable of self-denial and heroism than an infant baby; for getting along in the world and making a good match, I would rather have Sue Greyson's skin-"

"Her father understands anatomy, perhaps you can get it, mother."

"_She_ knows how to look out for number one. Her children will be settled in life before Tessa is engaged. You needn't laugh, Dine, it's her birthday, and I'm only doing a mother's duty to her."

Tessa's eyes laughed although her lips were still. Her sense of humor helped her to bear many things in her life.

"You have never had a trial in your life, Tessa, and here you are old enough to be a wife and mother!"

"If she lived in China she could be a grandmother," said Dinah.

"I have always kept trouble from you; that is why, at your mature age, you have so little character. In an emergency you would have no more responsibility than Nellie Bird. If you had studied arithmetic instead of always writing poetry and compositions, you might have been teaching now and have been independent."

"Father isn't tired of taking care of her," said Dinah, spiritedly.

"It's mean for you to say that."