A warning voice came from across the hall: “I’d like to know if your ball is getting bigger, Judith.”
Judith’s guilty fingers snatched her needle, and she began stitching a black strip to a brown strip as Aunt Rody had expressly forbidden her to do.
“They don’t have to _stay_ in the Wilderness,” replied Aunt Affy, “their own naughtiness kept them there.”
“H’m,” sniffed the voice across the hall. “I think some people who behave pretty well are kept in the Wilderness.”
“I like wild places,” said Judith, forgetting her ball again.
“And naughtiness, too,” snapped Aunt Rody.
“Oh, we all like that,” laughed Marion; “Aunt Rody, I am coming in there to tell _you_ a story.”
“Don’t want you,” grumbled Aunt Rody, in a relenting voice.
“I’m sure you have a story to tell me,” Judith heard Marion say, in the tone Roger Kenney called “wheedling.”
“My story is all hard work, privation, and ingratitude,” was the ready response.
As Aunt Affy sewed a tear fell on her coarse work, which Judith tried not to see.
Judith sewed diligently, wondering the while how she could make a turning-point for herself.
“Yes,” groaned the voice across the hall, “my past is not pleasant to dwell on, the present is full of contradictions and being opposed, and the future—well, I _hope_ I am a Christian.”
“I don’t believe you are,” whispered Judith softly over her rags.
A heavy step on the sod under the bedroom window brought sudden color to Aunt Affy’s old cheeks; with her sister’s groanings in her ears she was meditating if it were her duty to ask Cephas to go away again. Was the Lord asking her to choose between the two?
Pushing back his straw hat and leaning his shirt-sleeved arms on the window-sill, the old man stood, with his lover’s eyes on the delicate, sweet face of the woman he had loved thirty years.
“Well, Affy, how’s things?” he asked, joyously.
“Then I’ll get a bite and go back to work again. It does me good to come and have a look at you and know you are here.”
“And so shall I,” he answered, confidently.
After that, how could Aunt Affy but decide once again, and for ever, that he _should_ always be here.
“No act falls fruitless; none can tell How vast its power may be, Nor what results infolded dwell Within it silently.”