learning to read."

"Because she didn't know the good of it," replied Lucy. "But what
should you or I have done if we hadn't been made to learn, whether we
liked it or not?"

"That's quite different. This girl will always have to work, I
suppose, and would get on well enough without learning to read. I know
mamma was always complaining that our servants were reading trashy
novels, that filled their heads with nonsense and made them
discontented."

"But you could have given them something better to read," suggested
Lucy.

Stella said nothing in reply to this; nor did she enlighten Lucy as to
the fact that in reading "trashy novels" the servants were only
following their young mistresses' example. Lucy in the meantime was
thinking what up-hill work doing good was, and how hard it was to know
how to do it. Suddenly she remembered her motto; she had been
forgetting that the difficulties of the way were to be met in a
strength not her own. Perhaps it was because she had not first asked
for that strength, that she had met with so little success; and she
regretted having so soon departed from her resolution of "looking to
Jesus" in everything.

But Stella soon roused from her "brown study," as she called it, by
various questions as to Mrs. Harris's route of travel, and also as to
her travelling dress, which Lucy was very ill prepared to answer,
having cast hardly a passing glance at it, in her sorrow for her