"Come, Kit," said Mrs. Blunt, "you and me 'ull get to that mending. Jim's wearin' his best trousers 'cause we ain't done it." "But I don't know how," said Kittie, none too willingly. "Then I'll show yer. Come, Kit, be a good girl and do yer best. You've been taught yer needle, that's one good thing." "I wish I could leave school," grumbled Kit, as she fumbled in her pocket for her thimble; "there's lots o' girls as young as me has left." "Of course they 'ave! Them as is quick at their learning can leave sooner. I've telled you that a hundred times, but ye see ye haven't taken what I said." "I can't do no better," answered Kittie, "the lessons is so terrible hard." "Well, well," answered the mother, more patiently than usual, "perhaps the Lord can help you in your troubles as well as me. We'll see about it. You and me has a deal to learn, Kittie." Kittie knew that. She was always being told "she had a deal to learn." The daily pressure on her mother, that would have been so lightened could she have left school, made the subject return again and again to worry her. Inattentive and careless, she thought she could do no better, and hopelessly gave the whole matter up as a bad job. But when the mending was done, and she laid herself down in her little bed in the corner of her mother's room, behind the screen of a large towel-horse, which served as her bedroom, she began to think the matter over in rather a new light. What had her mother meant when she said, "perhaps the Lord would help her to do better in her lessons"? Was there any help in such a thing as that? And who was this "Lord" of whom her mother spoke? Kittie had perceived that things had been brighter for the last day or two, and if this had anything to do with this "Lord," of whom her mother seemed to expect something, she too would like to understand the whole matter. Long she lay awake, thinking. Sleep seemed to have left her eyelids. Her brothers came in from the street, and she watched through the open door her mother helping them to their rough little beds in the front room. By-and-by the hubbub was over, and quiet sank down upon the whole of them. Her father must be dozing, she supposed, as he said not a word, and her mother was unusually silent too. The click of her needle and the sharp rap of her scissors on the bare table were the only sounds inside the room. Outside the noisy roar went on as usual: the crying children, the scolding mothers, the cries of the fish and fruit sellers, the organ-grinders--everything just as usual. Presently her mother spoke. "Husband, I've been a thinkin' there must be something in them Seymours as is different from most folks." "Like enough," he answered. "There's a big print Bible or somethin' stuck up over old Mrs. Seymour's ironing-board. What should ye think that might be for, now?" "I don't know, I'm sure; you'd a deal better ask her if y'er so curious."