the apparent unthought about her; and this lifted her up in his regard
and enshrined her with a sort of pure sanctity. He was sometimes
really timid before her, in the midst of his frank chivalry.

"I wish you'd tell me," he said suddenly, falling back with her as the
path narrowed again. "What are the 'steps?'"

"It was a verse we found this morning,--Cousin Delight and I," Leslie
answered; and as she spoke the color came up full in her cheeks, and
her voice was a little shy and tremulous. "'The steps of a good man
are ordered by the Lord.' That one word seemed to make one certain.
'Steps,'--not path, nor the end of it; but all the way." Somehow she
was quite out of breath as she finished.

Meantime Sin Saxon and Frank had got with Miss Goldthwaite, and were
talking too.

"Set spinning," they heard Sin Saxon say, "and then let go. That was
his idea. Well! Only it seems to me there's been especial pains taken
to show us it can't be done. Or else, why don't they find out
perpetual motion? Everything stops after a while, unless--I can't talk
theologically, but I mean all right--you hit it again."

"You've a way of your own of putting things, Asenath," said Frank
Scherman--with a glance that beamed kindly and admiringly upon her and
"her way,"--"but you've put that clear to me as nobody else ever did.
A proof set in the very laws themselves,--momentum that must lessen
and lose itself with the square of the distance. The machinery cavil
won't do."