CHAPTER X.

SILENT FORCES.

"WHAT next?" she repeated, a little smile on her face. Dilly had a curious way of repeating Mr. Hart's words, and thereby expressing that she did not quite understand what he meant.

"Yes; I mean, having settled this question, how is it going to influence your life in any way? What is there about you that will be changed in any sense because of this decision?"

Dilly looked puzzled. "I don't know how to 'tell' the difference," she said, speaking slowly, as though she was carefully choosing each word, "but I can feel that there will be a difference."

"I hardly understand how, in you," Hart said, smiling on her very gently. "It would make a tremendous change in some people I know, but you have always done about right, haven't you?"

"O, Mr. Hart!" Dilly was genuinely shocked. "That isn't true at all; there are chances enough for change, only I don't know how to tell them."

"What chances?" he said, amused. "Haven't you always been a pretty good little girl?"

"I've fretted inside," said Dilly, gravely; "I've fretted a great deal, and thought it was mean for father to be so poor, and for me to be sick and make him more trouble; and even for mother to die." Her voice, which had been growing more and more tremulous, broke with that sentence, and she could not have said another word just then.

"Well," said Hart, not amused now, but speaking very gently indeed, "those do not seem to me to be very immense sins, in a little girl. Do you mean that you now understand why such things were allowed?"

Dilly shook her head: "No, sir; I don't understand them, only now I know that they must be right, and best, because I know that the Lord Jesus truly loves me, and loves father, and everybody, and of course he will do the best for us all. I needn't 'have' to understand it."

"And you mean to stop fretting inside, now?" The amused look had already returned to Hart's face. "So that's one difference; and what else?"

"First, I'll write to father; that will be one thing." Dilly's face was bright over this thought.

"Not a 'different' thing, surely; haven't I mailed two nice little letters to father, for you, since we have been up here?"

"O yes, sir! But this will be a different letter, very different from any I ever wrote; I have such news to tell him, about how I have decided and about what a difference it makes in everything."

"Are you going to write to him about it?"

"O yes, sir! I wouldn't keep father waiting until I got home."

"Do you write about it because you want to do so, or because you think you ought?"

"Why, I like to write it; father will be so glad! And then, I think I ought, besides."

"But suppose he wouldn't be glad; I mean, suppose he did not understand about such things and would hardly know what you meant? Would you tell him then?"

"O yes," said Dilly with quiet assurance, "because you know I should want him to understand, and have it for himself just as quick as he could; and besides, fathers and mothers ought to know all about us, of course; and anyhow, there's a bigger reason, I suppose, than that. Jesus said we were to shine. I read that verse this morning, Mr. Hart. I wanted a verse to help me begin to live right, and the Bible is such a big book I wondered how I should find it, and I opened straight to that verse. Wasn't it strange?"

"Very. And then and there you made up your mind to 'shine,' did you? I suppose that is the way to do. But won't you have a busy life if you adopt all the Bible verses and measure your doings by them? I heard a young man last night quote a verse which seems to me reaches so far that it wouldn't give one much time for anything else. 'Whether therefore ye eat or drink or whatever ye do, do all to the glory of God.' Do you think you can manage that?"

"'Whatever' you do;" Dilly repeated the words in a startled tone, as though she had never heard them before. "Why, that means everything!"

"It appears to."

"But how 'could' people?"

"That is the question I asked."

"But it is in the Bible?"

"Aye, it is there, in exactly those words; I took the trouble to look it up and see if he said it right."

"Then there is some way to do it, of course; but I don't understand how."

Just at that moment they were joined by a young man, evidently a friend of Hart's, and the two talked together, leaving Dilly to her perplexed thoughts. At a corner where two streets crossed, Hart turned to her:

"Now, little woman, I will take the left-hand road, and you may take the right one; it will bring you home by a pleasanter route; you are almost there now; I want to do some errands down town."

So Dilly was left to herself. She was not sorry; she had a great deal to think about; this new idea Mr. Hart had given her was very large. How was it possible that her quiet, every-day life should be to God's glory?

From out a vine-wreathed cottage door came a pretty little girl, watering pot hung on her fingers, a small garden hoe tucked under her arm, the handle grasped by both chubby hands.

Dilly smiled on her; she recognized in her one of the little girls who had listened to that Sunday-school lesson about Jesus "drawing" people to himself, and who had watched afterward, the making of that wonderful picture of the tree that filled the whole earth, and reached out its arms to save. She wondered if the little girl had understood, and had been drawn to Jesus? Also, she wondered how it was possible that such a little bit of a girl who probably had no work except to hoe a little among the flowers, could do things for God's glory? How could hoeing, for instance, have anything whatever to do with God? And yet flowers ought to be hoed.

[Illustration: DILLY'S SUNDAY-SCHOOL ACQUAINTANCE.]

"Are you going to make a garden?" she asked pleasantly, seeing that the little girl sweetly returned her smile.

"I'm going to water mamma's flowers, and hoe out some of the weeds; they grow very fast up here, worse than they do at home."

"Do you like to water flowers, and hoe weeds?"

"Some I do: I like it here better than at home, it is so hot at home; and the flowers get so dusty; but we have lots and lots of flowers in our garden at home; ever so many more than we have room for here. And we have lovely fall flowers too, that we don't stay up here long enough to have. Mamma has millions of kinds, I guess."

There came the new question crowding into Dilly's heart and shutting out her enjoyment of this flower story. Why was it right to have so many flowers, and to spend so much time as she knew it must take, to care for them?

"Why, what do you do with so many flowers?"

Dilly asked the question somewhat absently, more because she saw the child waiting for her to speak, than because she cared for the answer; of course they put them in vases, and enjoyed them.

"Oh! Lots of things," the little flower girl said, triumphantly. "We always take them to church, and Sunday-school, great loads of them; Dr. Halbert says they help him preach; he's our minister, you know. Once he preached about 'Consider the lilies'; Jesus said that, you know, and mamma had every kind of lily you can think of, in church that day; and a man most eighty years old told mamma he had never understood before, how wonderful God was to make so many flowers, or something like that; I can't remember just how it was. Then mamma sends flowers to the hospital for the sick people to look at, and rest themselves; and she always sends them to houses where poor people live, when any one dies; once I went with her and we put lovely rosebuds all around a little bit of a coffin where a baby was; it looked just as sweet! Her mamma came in to see her, and when she saw the flowers she cried; I thought they made her feel bad, but mamma said no, they helped her; and she told mamma afterwards they made her think of her baby in Heaven. I don't see how, do you?" asked the little girl simply.

"Yes, a little," said Dilly, smiling.

Then she stooped and kissed the flower girl and said "Thank you," though I don't think the child knew for what she was being thanked. Dilly knew; she had learned a great deal in those few minutes. Here were flowers speaking just as loud as they could for God's glory, and if the child pulled out the weeds which hindered them, because she wanted their sweet voices to speak for him, Dilly could see how the work fitted the new verse.

It was very wonderful. Did everything fit?

As for Hart Hammond, he also had something to think about; something which Dilly had furnished, though she did not know it.