The doctor promised, of course. No one could resist Ruth when she was
like that, and in due time certain forces were set in operation to the
end that she might have her desire.
Meanwhile, as she waited, Ruth filled her days with thoughts of others,
not forgetting Cameron's mother for whom she was always preparing some
little surprise, a dainty gift, some fruit or flowers, a book that she
thought might comfort and while away her loneliness, a restful ride at
the early evening, all the little things that a thoughtful daughter might
do for a mother. And Cameron's mother wrote him long letters about it all
which would have delighted his heart during those dreary days if they
could only have reached him then.
Ruth's letters to Cameron were full of the things she was doing, full of
her sweet wise thoughts that seemed to be growing wiser every day. She
had taken pictures of her Italian friends and introduced him to them one
by one. She had filled every page with little word pictures of her daily
life. It seemed a pity that he could not have had them just when he
needed them most. It would have filled her with dismay if she could have
known the long wandering journey that was before those letters before
they would finally reach him; she might have been discouraged from
writing them.
Little Mrs. Beck was suddenly sent for one Sunday morning to attend her
sister who was very ill, and she hastily called Ruth over the telephone
and begged her to take her place at the Sunday school. Ruth promised to
secure some one to teach the lesson, but found to her dismay that no one
was willing to go at such short notice. And so, with trembling heart she
knelt for a hasty petition that God would guide her and show her how to
lead these simple people in the worship of the day.
As she stood before them trying to make plain in the broken, mixed
Italian and English, the story of the blind man, which was the lesson for
the day, there came over her a sense of her great responsibility. She
knew that these people trusted her and that what she told them they would
believe, and her heart lifted itself in a sharp cry for help, for light,
to give to them. She felt an appalling lack of knowledge and experience
herself. Where had she been all these young years of her life, and what
had she been doing that she had not learned the way of life so that she
might put it before them?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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