The Parkerstown Delegate Read Online Free PDF Page A

good they might be able to do, but now to have this young man come-oh! It would be dreadful. It would be an impossibility to pray, and yet what could she say to Harley? Moreover, it appeared that Franklin was waiting in the other room for admittance. Lois must answer quickly.
    “Why, Harley” she said, and her voice trembled as she looked down and fumbled with some papers between the leaves of her Bible, “I am afraid your brother wouldn’t enjoy it. It’s just us, you know, and”—
    “Oh, yes, he would!” broke in Harley. “I told him all about it, and he said, all of his own accord, that he wished we would let him come, and his eyes looked real ‘want to’ when he said it, and he asked ever so many questions about it; so he knows just what it is. He said he thought if Sallie came that he might, and that he’d like to ever so much.”
    Before Lois had time to reply Franklin himself appeared at the door with Sallie, and his pleasant eyes were upon Lois’s face while he asked:
    “You are going to let me come, too, aren’t you? Harley said he thought you would be glad to have an addition. I can’t do much, to be sure, but I think I might manage to conduct myself as honorably as Pepper here,” and he gave the dog a pat on the head, which was highly appreciated.

Chapter 4
    Franklin sat down then, and there was nothing for Lois to do but submit, although she would gladly have fled the house and her newly fledged Christian Endeavor Society and never come back any more. Harley was to lead the meeting, so she had nothing to do but await developments, but she sat with her eyes down and her whole body in a quiver. Harley asked her almost immediately to pray for the opening of the meeting. She knelt down with not a thought in her mind and scarcely a desire in her heart, except that she might be helped to get out of this trying situation, and the help came. “Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, ‘This is the way, walk ye in it, . . .Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.”
    Surely those promises were fulfilled for her that day. She had not known what to say nor how to say anything indeed, but the young man who knelt across the room listening was amazed, and found himself wondering if it was really Lois Peters who was talking in that sweet voice, apparently to some One who stood close beside her, and in whom she seemed to have the utmost confidence. He seemed to feel that he was being prayed about too, although his name was not uttered, and for the first time in his life he believed that there was something in religion which he did not understand, a power that reached into the heart-life as nothing else could do. Harley felt the influence of that prayer too, as he took up the petition where Lois left off:
    “Please, dear God, we thank Thee that we have some new members to our society. Help them to get to be active members pretty soon. Let Pepper be a good member, if he is only a dog. He can run around and do the errands I could do if I were like other boys. Amen.”
    The little dog curled up on the bed beside his young master, opened his eyes and raised his head inquiringly at the mention of his name, but seeing Harley’s eyes closed, he rested his cold nose confidingly against Harley’s clasped hands and closed his own eyes until the Amen, when he gave a soft whine of satisfaction and settled down among the pillows again. Franklin’s eyes were wet with tears when he raised his face from his hands, and Lois’s face was grave, but little Sallie Elder sat immovable on the edge of her chair, with wide-open eyes, throughout the entire service, uncertain just what to call this strange performance to which she had been invited. It was not until Harley read slowly and carefully a story from the Bible that she began to be interested, and by and by when the reading was over and the meeting thrown open for remarks, she was persuaded into repeating her one Bible