“Emilie, I will tell you something—­your patience, your example, has done me a great deal of good, I hope; but there is one thing in your kind of advice, which does me more good than all.  You have talked more of the love of God than of any other part of his character, and the words which first struck me very much, when I first began to wish that I were different, were those you told me one Sunday evening, some time ago.  ’Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and gave his Son a ransom for sinners.’  There seemed such a contrast between my conduct to God, and His to me; and then it has made me, I hope, a little more, (a very little, you know,) I am not boasting, Emilie, am I? it has made me a little more willing to look over things which used to vex me so.  What are Fred’s worst doings to me, compared with my best to God?”

Thus they talked, and now, indeed, did the friends love one another; and heartily did each, by her bedside that night, thank God for his gospel, which tells of his love to man, the greatest illustration truly of the law of kindness.

CHAPTER NINTH.

FRED A PEACEMAKER.

“Talk not of wasted affection, affection never is wasted.... its waters returning back to their spring, like the rain shall fill them full of refreshment”—­H.  W. Longfellow.

“Well Fred,” said Emilie at the supper table, from which Mr. Parker was absent, “I go away to-morrow and we part better friends than we met, I think, don’t we?”

“Oh yes, Miss Schomberg, we are all better friends, and it is all your doing.”

“My doing, oh no!  Fred, that is flattery.  I have not made Edith so gentle and so good as she has of late been to you. I never advised her to give up that little room to you nor to send poor Muff away.”

“Didn’t you? well, now I always thought you did; I always kid that to you, and so I don’t believe I have half thanked Edith as I ought.”

“Indeed you might have done.”

“Well, I hope I shall not get quarrelsome at school again, but I wish I was in a large school.  I fancy I should be much happier.  Only being us five at Mr. Barton’s, we are so thrown together, somehow we can’t help falling out and interfering with each other sometimes.  Now there is young White, I never can agree with him, it is impossible.”

“Dear me!” said Emilie, without contradicting him, “why?”

“He treats me so very ill; not openly and above-board, as we say, but in such a nasty sneaking way, he is always trying to injure me.  He knows sometimes I fall asleep after I am called.  Well, he dresses so quietly, (I sleep in his room, I wish I didn’t,) he steals down stairs and then laughs with such triumph when I come down late and get a lecture or a fine for it.  If I am very busy over an exercise out of school hours, he comes and talks to me, or reads some entertaining book close to my ears, aloud to one of the boys, to hinder my doing it properly, but that is not half his nasty ways.  Could you love such a boy Miss Schomberg?”