"Hugh, get up," he called, "it is ten minutes to--why it is ten minutes _past_ twelve, and no good at all!" [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XIX. _WORRIED._ "Agnes, my child, being left in charge does not agree with you." "Why, auntie?" "Your mother will find but a shadow of the rosy girl she left behind her." Agnes sighed, and then got up and looked in the glass. "I do not see that I am different," she said, after a moment's contemplation. "No, I daresay you would not notice it in yourself from day to day. But you have nothing special to trouble you, my dear, I hope?" "Not at all, auntie. But I had no idea the anxiety of a family would be so great." Aunt Phyllis smiled a sweet placid smile, which proceeded from a heart at rest after storms. "You ought not to be carrying your own burdens though, dear child," she said softly. Agnes had seated herself at her aunt's feet, on the wide stool which the children said was made on purpose for them to share, and now looked up in her aunt's face with tearful eyes. "No," she said; "that is often what grieves me. I am afraid, auntie, I thought I should be _sure_ to get on, and trusted in my own cleverness too much, and then when difficulties come I get downhearted." "And do you try the remedy of taking everything to your Lord directly it comes?" "Yes; but things are so difficult to decide, and I am so disappointed in myself." "You thought you were so much stronger than you find yourself?" "Yes; and John looks up to me, and I hoped I should be a help to him; and instead I've done nothing but find out that I'm no good at all." "I suppose you are rather tired of gazing in the looking-glass, then?" said Aunt Phyllis quaintly. "Auntie?" "I'd look towards the sky next, if I were you!" she added, smiling, as she got up to go and fetch some work. Agnes was left alone; and she glanced first in the fire, and then at the mirror above her head, and then her eyes wandered to the window. "I see!" she exclaimed, a light breaking over her downcast face; "I'm to look off to Jesus; that's what auntie means!" That morning Agnes had passed through some of those little difficulties which so often arise in daily life. First the housemaid had accosted her with the ominous words, "Please, miss, could I speak to you?" and had thereupon given her a month's notice. On her pressing for a reason the maid had said, with many blushes, that she was intending to be married directly her time was up. "But can you not wait till mother comes home?" pleaded Agnes. "I trust she will be home in March; that would be only another month. Could you not arrange it so?" But the girl persisted that she could not alter; and so Agnes had had reluctantly to make up her mind to a fresh responsibility, and determined to consult her Aunt Phyllis on the subject. And while her mind was perturbed with the annoyance of having to install another servant in her mother's absence, came another small trouble.