her friend rest there, but because of that despairing murmur in her
heart. "What is the use in saying anything? Had she not heard with her
own ears Marion's sneering sentence in the face of the unanswerable
arguments that had been presented?" I wonder how often we turn away from
harvest fields that are ready for the reader because we mistake for a
sneer that which is the admission of a convicted soul?

By afternoon Ruth was rested and ready for meeting; if the truth be
known it was her troubled brain which had tired her body and obliged her
to rest. She had begun to take up that problem of "Christian work." The
platform meeting of the evening before, and, more than anything else,
Dr. Niles' address, had fanned her heart into a flame of desire to do
something for the Master. But what could she do? She and Flossy had
talked it over together after they reached their room at the hotel; in
fact they talked away into the night.

"I don't know," Flossy said, with a little laugh, "but I shall have to
depend on the 'unconscious influence' which I exert to do my work for
me. I don't know of anything which I can actually _do_. Dr. Niles made a
great deal of that."

"Yes," Ruth, said, "but you see, Flossy, the people whose unconscious
influence does any good are the ones after all who are moving around
_trying_ to do something. I don't feel sure that he lets the unconscious
influence of the drones amount to much, unless it is in the wrong scale.
Dr. Niles made a good deal of _that_, you remember."

"Don't you like him ever so much, Ruth?"

"Why, yes," Ruth said again, turning her pillow wearily. "I liked him of