"What do you mean?" inquired Mrs. Ashford, drawing her on her lap. Then Marty told all about the meeting, and what she had been thinking, and how she had prayed to be a missionary. "I want to be one if God wants me to, but I don't see how I _can_ go away and leave you all," she said, half crying. "Well," said her mother soothingly, seeing she was trembling with excitement, "we need not talk about it yet. It will be a long time until you are old enough or know enough to go. You will have to go to school many years yet, and then, perhaps, to college, for you know the better missionaries are educated the more good they can do. Then you must learn to make your own clothes and take care of them, and it is well to know a good deal about housekeeping also, for missionaries have to know how to be independent, and be ready for any kind of life. You would hardly be prepared to go before you are twenty, anyway, and that is ten years yet." "Nine and a half," put in Marty. "In the meantime you can be doing as much as possible for missions at home." "Yes," said Marty, wiping her eyes and looking comforted, "that's so. We needn't think of my going away yet, and I s'pose the right way is to do as Miss Agnes says. She says the best way in mission work, as in everything else, is just to do the nearest thing and do it as well as we possibly can, and then be willing to let God lead us along from one step to another." "She is certainly right," said Mrs. Ashford. "I have taken some steps since Edith got me started, haven't I? I've learned a good deal about missions, and I find it a great deal easier to give money regularly now than when I began. Don't you remember how at first I either wanted to give every cent I had or else not to give anything? But I found out that wasn't the best way to do." "And another thing," said Mrs. Ashford, "you have been the means of some of the rest of us taking steps. Seeing how well your systematic giving is working, I have started in to do the same way." "Oh! _have_ you, mamma?" exclaimed Marty. "Are you going to have a box for tenths? How delightful!" "No, not a box--my square Russia-leather pocketbook. And not tenths exactly, but what you call the New Testament way." "That's just lovely!" said Marty, caressing her. "I'm so glad. So we'll both be mission workers the rest of our lives, wont we?" "With God's help, we will," replied her mother. "And p'r'aps dear little Freddie will begin, too, when he gets old enough. You know there are boy bands. But where is Freddie? He was here when I came in." Just then a high-pitched little voice from the next room called, "Whoop! Marty!" "There he is. I wonder what sort of a funny place he's hiding in this time," said Marty, laughing and running to see. Freddie had taken one of his papa's large handkerchiefs out of the lower drawer of the bureau, and spreading it out over his head was standing in the middle of the room, hiding. How he laughed when Marty found him!