“An old maid,” I remarked, coldly.  “She is pretty and sweet, though faded, I suppose.”

“Why, no—­not to look at:  her nature is beautiful, but her manner and figure are rather—­rather unprepossessing at first.”

“A stiff, hard, straight-laced old maid,” I said, contemptuously.  “Well, really, I cannot see the fascination—­”

Bessie’s face flushed painfully:  “I confess that dear Miss Pepper’s person is not so beautiful as her nature, but, Winnie, it is the cause of doing good and trying to be good that draws us together so closely; and of course I do not love her as I love you, my dear, precious first friend.”

These last words were full of balm, for of course it was the sting of jealousy that had made my heart resent the venerable Pepper’s powerful influence over my dear Bessie.  Being once assured that it was a second-rate power, and that I still held my supremacy, I entered into the Sunday-school question like a second Raikes, and volunteered to help, and try to learn the way to the young hearts that beat under the pugilistic exterior of the juveniles of Canon lane, where the mission chapel was.

Then, having become one on this serious subject, we began to wonder what Mr. Haines’ dream might portend this time, and prepare our minds for the verse from the prophecies over which dear Uncle Pennyman had made his latest stumble.

“Mrs. Tanner thinks it was something about a journey, and she is quite out of sorts on the subject:  for, as she says, the house can’t be shut up without worriment, and as to staying in it alone she really has not got the nerve.”

“I do not think that Uncle Pennyman will interpret it that way, because he cannot go too, as he is at present very deep in the minor prophets, and has fallen out of humor with all the commentaries.”

“I am so glad!” said Bessie, placidly—­“so glad, I mean, that we need not go:  I think every one must find his life-work at home.”

I stared a little at this, because I knew that only a few months before Bessie Haines had wanted very much to find style and fashion abroad; but I remembered the Sunday-school, and tried to be as serious and convinced as I could; and to that end I talked a good deal of church interests, and the prophecies, and Light in Obscurity, a new work which had utterly confused me at the first chapter, but which I had read through to Uncle Pennyman one warm July day when he stayed at home to keep Tom’s birth-day.

That reminds me:  I have not mentioned Tom, but as he was away at college, and Bessie never seemed to like to talk of him—­I’m sure I can’t see why—­it is quite natural that he slipped out of my memory.

He was a ward of Uncle Pennyman, who called him his son, and indeed had adopted him formally.

How two such opposite people ever came to love each other as they did, I never can explain.  It was not a natural, commonplace affection:  it was a strong, deep, earnest love, as firm in the hearts of both as the life that caused their throbbings.