Now the moralities of conversation were apt to glide off from Sharley like rain-drops from gutta-percha, and I cannot assert that these words would have made profound impression upon her had not Halcombe Dike’s mother happened to say them.

Be that as it may, she certainly took them home with her, and pondered them in her heart; pondered till late in her feverish, sleepless night, till her pillow grew wet, and her heart grew still.  About midnight she jumped out into the cold, and kneeled, with her face hidden in the bed.

“O, I’ve been a naughty girl!” she said, just as she might have said it ten years ago.  She felt so small, and ignorant, and weak that night.

Out of such smallness, and ignorance, and weakness great knowledge and strength may have beautiful growth.  They came in time to Sharley, but it was a long, slow time.  Moppet was just as unendurable, the baby just as fretful, life just as joyless, as if she had taken no new outlook upon it, made no new, tearful plans about it.

“Calico! calico!” she cried out a dozen times a day; “nothing but calico!”

But by and by it dawned in her thoughts that this was a very little matter to cry out about.  What if God meant that some lives should be “all just alike,” and like nothing fresh or bonnie, and that hers should be one?  That was his affair.  Hers was to use the dull gray gift he gave—­whatever gift he gave—­as loyally and as cheerily as she would use treasures of gold and rose-tint.  He knew what he was doing.  What he did was never forgetful or unkind.  She felt—­after a long time, and in a quiet way—­that she could be sure of that.

No matter about Halcombe Dike, and what was gone.  No matter about the little black aprons, and what was coming.  He understood all about that.  He would take care of it.

Meantime, why could she not as well wash Moppet’s face with a pleasant word as with a cross one? darn the stockings with a smile as well as a frown? stay and hear her mother discuss her headaches as well as run away and think of herself?  Why not give happiness since she could not have it? be of use since nobody was of much use to her?  Easier saying than doing, to be sure, Sharley found; but she kept the idea in mind as the winter wore away.

She was thinking about it one April afternoon, when she had stolen out of the house for a walk in the budding woods.  She had need enough of a walk.  It was four weeks now since she had felt the wide wind upon her face; four weeks pleasantly occupied in engineering four boys through the measles; and if ever a sick child had the capacity for making of himself a seraph upon earth it was Moppet.  It was a thin little face which stood out against the “green mist” of the unfurling leaves as Sharley wandered in and out with sweet aimlessness among the elms and hickories; very thin, with its wistful eyes grown hollow; a shadow of the old Sharley who fluttered among the plaid ribbons one October morning.  It was a saddened face—­it might always be a saddened face—­but a certain pleasant, rested look had worked its way about her mouth, not unlike the rich mellowness of a rainy sunset.  Not that Sharley knew much about sunsets yet; but she thought she did, which, as I said before, amounts to about the same thing.