No one seeing that pale patient face on the pillow of her couch would ever have dreamt what she was, not only to her own mother, father, and sister, but to all who lived in the house. When people came as new tenants, they would hear from one and the other of "little Winny Chaplin" before they had been in the house a week, and if anybody was in trouble, Winny was sure to know all about it. The little back room they occupied was in point of fact the heart of that house with its cluster of households, and so it was no uncommon thing for one and the other to open the door and exchange a word or two with the invalid, especially when her mother was out all day. In this way she learned to know her neighbours as her mother never would; for there was something so winning about the girl, that people talking to her forgot sometimes that she was only a girl, and told her of troubles that they would have shrunk from imparting to older and wiser friends. Then, too, Winny always had time to listen to their stories, and the very telling them to such a sympathetic listener often lifted the load a little; and if Winny could do no more, she would whisper tenderly to her visitor: "God knows all about it, you know. I will ask him to help you." Sometimes a curious smile would part the lips of the complainer when she said this, for however heavy the trouble under discussion might be, it rarely happened that it was so great as that affliction she herself was called upon to endure, and perhaps the visitor would add: "Do you think God knows about your own trouble?" "Oh yes, I'm sure he does," Winny would reply with a bright look. "He is so good to me that—that—I hardly know how to be thankful enough. I wasn't just at first, you know," she would hasten to add. "I used to think that God ought to make me well quick, and let me go to Sunday-school again; and when he did not seem to hear, and I got weaker and weaker, I began to cry, until one day it all at once came over me like a great light that God had some work for me to do lying still on this couch. Then I thought how the Lord Jesus had been willing to come and live here—and it must have been a very horrid place for him to live in; but he came to do his Father's work and to save us, and so he did not mind. And when I thought of this, I felt so glad that I forgot the pain in my back for a long time. So, you see, God is helping me all the time, for he is always pouring just as much gladness into my heart as I can bear." "But, Winny," the friends had said, "if God helps you as you say, why does not he make you well? Don't you think he could?"