time a still small voice told her that love was the fulfilling of the
law, but so still, so small, so habitual was it that she lost it as we
lose the ticking of a clock, and it was not with increased love for
Susannah that she began a course of redoubled zeal.

The girl became frightened, not so much of her aunt as of God. The
simple child's prayer for the keeping of her soul which she had been in
the habit of repeating morning and evening became a terror to her,
because she did not understand her aunt's phraseology. The "soul" it
dealt with was not herself, her thoughts, feelings, and powers, but a
mysterious something apart from these, for whose welfare these must all
be sacrificed.

Susannah had heard of fairies and ghosts; she inclined to shove this
sort of soul into the same unreal region. The dreary artificial heaven,
which seemed to follow logically if she accepted the basal fact of a
soul separated from all her natural powers, could be dispensed with
also. This was her hope, but she was not sure. How could she be sure
when she was so young and dependent? It was almost her only solace to
interpret Ephraim's silence by her own unbelief, and she rested her
weary mind against her vague notions of Ephraim's support.

One August day Mrs. Croom drove with her husband to a distant funeral.

In the afternoon when the sunshine was falling upon the fields of maize,
when the wind was busy setting their ribbon-like leaves flapping, and
rocking the tree-tops, Ephraim Croom was disturbed in his private room
by the blustering entrance of Susannah.

The room was an attic; the windows of the gable looked west; slanting