"The fact is, girls, the church of Christ doesn't need any benefit. We degrade it by talking as though it did. No, we will divide the proceeds of the concert in shares among ourselves; that is we, the workers, will for the time being go into business and earn money that shall be ours. We will not plead poverty, or ask people to listen to us because of benevolence; we will simply give them a chance to hear a good thing if they want to, and the money shall be ours to do exactly what we please with. Of course, if we please to give every cent of it to the church, that is our individual affair."

New ground this, for those girls; they had never before heard the like; but there was an instant outgrowth of self-respect because of it.

"Then we can't coax people to buy tickets?" said Nettie. "I'm so glad."

"Of course not. The very utmost that propriety will allow us to do will be to exhibit our goods for sale, so much for such an equivalent, and allow people the privilege of choosing what they will do, and where they will go."

The girls, each and all, agreed that from that standpoint they would as soon offer tickets for sale as not; and instantly they stepped upon that new platform and argued from it in the future, to the great amazement and somewhat to the bewilderment of some of their elders.

Thereafter, rehearsals for the concert became the daily order of things; not much time to spend each day, for nothing could be done until lessons were over and all regular duties honorably discharged. The more need then for promptness and diligence on the part of each helper, and the more glaringly improper it became to delay matters by having to stay behind for a half-prepared lesson. Never had the Academy, or the village, for that matter, been so full of eager, throbbing, healthy life, as those girls made it.

Their numbers grew, also. At first, the music-class was disposed, like the others, to be exclusive, and to shake its head with a lofty negative when one and another of the outsiders proposed this or that thing which they would do to help. But Miss Benedict succeeded in tiding them over that shoal.

"It is their church, girls, as well as ours. We must not hinder them from showing their love."

"Great love they have had," sneered one; "they never thought of doing a thing until we commenced."

But they were all honest, these girls, and this very one who had offered her sneer, added in sober second thought:

"Though, to be sure, for the matter of that, neither did we, until you begun it. Well, let them come in; I don't care."

"And we want to do so much," said Miss Benedict, with enthusiasm; "if I were you I would take all the help I could get."

Meantime, the other schemes connected with this gigantic enterprise flourished. There seemed no end to the devices for money-making, all of them in somewhat new channels, too.

"Not a tidy in the enterprise," said Ruth Jennings, gravely, as she tried to explain some of the work to her mother. "Who ever heard of a church getting itself repaired without the aid of tidies and pin-cushions! I wonder when they began with such things, mother? Do you suppose St. Paul had to patronize fairs, and buy slippers and things, for the benefit of churches in Ephesus or Corinth?"

The bewildered mother, with a vague idea that Ruth was being almost irreverent, could not, for all that, decide how to answer her.

"For there isn't any religion in those things, of course," she said to the equally-puzzled father, "and it did sound ridiculous to hear St. Paul's name brought into it! That Miss Benedict has all sorts of new ideas."

In the course of time, the boys (who are quite likely to become interested in anything that has deeply interested the girls) were drawn into service. Here, too, the ways of working were unusual and suggestive. Miss Benedict heard of one who had promised to give all the cigars he would probably have smoked in two months' time, whereupon she made this eager comment:

"Oh, what a pity that it is not going to take us fifty years to repair the church! then we would get him to promise to give us the savings of cigars until it was done!"

This was duly reported to him, and gave him food for thought.

Another promised the savings from sleigh-rides that he had intended to take, and another gravely wrote down in Ruth Jennings' note-book: "Harry Matthews, $1.10; the price of two new neckties and a bottle of hair oil!" There was more than fun to some of these entries. Some of the boys could not have kept their pledges if there had not been these queer little sacrifices.

One evening there was a new development. Ruth Jennings brought the news. The much-abused, long-suffering, neglectful sexton of the half-alive church notified the startled trustees that he had received a louder call to the church on the other corner, and must leave them. It really was startling news; for bad as he had been, not one in the little village could be thought of who would be likely to supply his place.

Ruth reported her father as filled with consternation.

"I wish I were a man!" savagely announced Anna Graves, "then I would offer myself for the position at once. It is as easy to make three dollars a month in that way as it is in any other that I know of."

That was the first development of the new idea. Miss Benedict bestowed a sudden glance, half of amusement, half of pleasure, on her aspiring pupil, and was silent.

"If it were not for the fires," was Nettie Burdick's slow-spoken sentence, rather as if she were thinking aloud than talking. That is the way the idea began to grow.

Then Ruth Jennings, with a sudden dash, as she was very apt to enter into a subject:

"It is no harder to make fires in church stoves than it is in sitting-room ones. I've done that often. I say, girls, let's do it!"

Every one of them knew that she meant the church stoves instead of the sitting-room ones, and that was the way that the idea took on flesh, and stood up before them.

There followed much eager discussion and of course some demurs. Nothing ever was done yet, or ever will be, without somebody objecting to it. At least, this was what Ruth said; and she added that she could not, to save her life, help being a little more settled in a determination after she had heard somebody oppose it a trifle.

However, the trustees opposed it more than a trifle. They were amazed. Such an innovation on the time-honored ways of South Plains had never been heard of before. Argument ran high. The half-doubtful girls came squarely over to the aggressive side, and waxed eloquent over the plan. It was carried at last, as Miss Benedict, looking on and laughing, told the girls she knew it would be.

"When you get fairly roused, my girls, I observe that you are quite apt to carry the day." She did not tell them that they were girls after her own heart, but I think perhaps she looked it.

One request the trustees growled vigorously over, which was that the new sextons should be paid in advance for a half-year's work. What if they failed?

"We won't fail," said Ruth indignantly, "and if we do, can't you conceive of the possibility of our being honest? We will not keep a cent of the precious money that has not been earned."

Whereupon, Mr. Jennings, in a private conference with the trustees, went over to the enemy's side, and promised to stand security for them, remarking apologetically that the girls had all gone crazy over something, his Ruth among the number. Therefore eighteen dollars were gleefully added to the treasury. The sum was certainly growing.

The Sabbath following the installation of the new sextons marked a change in the appearance of the old church. The floors had been carefully swept and cleansed, the young ladies drawing on their precious funds for the purpose of paying a woman who had scrubbed vigorously.

"It would be more fascinating," Ruth Jennings frankly admitted, "to let all the improvements come in together in one grand blaze of glory; but then it would be more decent to have those floors scrubbed, and I move that we go in for decency, to the sacrifice of glory, if need be."

So they did. Not a particle of dust was to be seen on that Sabbath morning anywhere about the sanctuary. From force of habit, the men carefully brushed their hats with their coat-sleeves as they took possession of them again, the service over; but the look of surprise on the faces of some over the discovery that there was nothing to brush away, was a source of amusement to a few of the watchful girls.

Also the few stragglers who returned for the evening service were caught looking about them in a dazed sort of way, as though they deemed it just possible that there might be an incipient fire in progress that threatened the building. Not that a new lamp had been added; the chimneys had simply been washed in soapsuds, and polished until they shone, and new wicks had been furnished, the workers declaring that their consciences really would not allow them to do less. The effect of these very commonplace efforts was somewhat astonishing, even to them.

"It is well we did it," affirmed Anna Graves with serious face. "I believe we ought to get the people used to these things by degrees or they will be frightened."

One question Claire puzzled over in silence: Did the minister really preach a better sermon that evening? Was it possible that the cleanliness about him might have put a little energy into his discouraged heart, or had she been so tired with her week of toil, that to see every one of her dozen girls out to church, and sit back and look at them through the brightness of clean lamps, was restful and satisfying? She found that she could not decide on the minister as yet. Perhaps the carrying of such a load as that church, for years, was what had taken the spring out of his voice and the life out of his words.

About these things nothing must be said, yet could not something be done? How could she and her girls help that pastor?

Meantime, some of the girls came to her one evening, bursting with laughter:

"Oh, Miss Benedict, we have a new recruit! You couldn't guess who. We shall certainly succeed now, with such a valuable reinforcement. Oh, girls, we know now why Miss Benedict sprained her ankle, and kept us all waiting for a week! This is a direct result from that week's work."

"What are you talking about?" said Miss Benedict, with smiling eyes and sympathetic voice. It was a great addition to her power over those girls that she held herself in readiness always to join their fun at legitimate moments. Sad-hearted she often was, but what good that those young things should see it? "Who is your recruit?"

"Why, Bud!" they said, and then there were shouts of laughter again, and Ruth could hardly command her voice to explain: "He came to me last night—tramped all the way up to our house in the snow, after meeting—because he said he wasn't so ''fraid' of me as he was of 'all them others.' Was that a compliment, girls, or an insult? Yes, Miss Benedict, he wants to help; offers to 'tend the fires,' and I shouldn't wonder if he could do it much better than it has been done at least. It was real funny, and real pitiful, too. He said it was the only 'livin' thing he knew how to do,' and that he was sure and certain he could do, and if it would help any, he would be awful glad to join."

"But doesn't he want to be paid?" screamed one of the girls.

"Paid? not he! I tell you he wants to join us. He said he wanted to do it to please her. That means you, Miss Benedict. You have won his heart in some way. Oh, it is the fruit of the sprained ankle. You know, girls, she said it was surely for some good purpose." Then they all went off into ecstatic laughter again. They were just at the age when it takes so little to convulse girls.

"But I am not yet enlightened," explained Claire, as soon as there was hope of her being heard. "Who is Bud?"

"Oh, is it possible you don't remember him? That is too cruel, when he is just devoted to you! Why, he is the furnace-boy at the Ansteds. I don't know where he saw you. He muttered something about the furnace and the register that I did not understand; but he plainly intimated that he was ready to be your devoted servant, and die for you, if need be, or at least, make the church fires as many days and nights as you should want them. Now the question is, what shall we do to the poor fellow?"

The furnace-boy at the Ansteds! Oh, yes, Claire remembered him, a great, blundering, apparently half-witted, friendless, hopeless boy. Claire's heart had gone out in pity for him the first time she ever saw him. He had been sent to her room to make some adjustment of the register-screw, and she had asked him if he understood furnaces, and if he liked to work, and if the snow was deep, and a few other aimless questions, just for the sake of speaking to him with a pleasant voice, and seeming to take an interest in his existence. Her father's heart had always overflowed with tenderness and helpfulness for all such boys. Claire had pleased herself—or perhaps I might say saddened herself—with thinking what her father, if he were alive, and should come in contact with Bud, would probably try to do for him. She could think of ways in which her father would work to help him, but she sadly told herself that all that was passed; her father was gone where he could not help Bud, and there were few men like him; and the boy would probably have to stumble along through a cold and lonely world. She had not thought of one thing that she could do for him; indeed, it had not so much as occurred to her as possible that there could be anything. After that first day she had not seen him again, until he came to the music-room with a message for Ella, and she had turned her head and smiled, and said "Good-morning!" and that was really all that she knew about Bud. She had forgotten his existence; and she had been sorrowing because her week at the Ansteds seemed to have accomplished nothing at all.

Her face was averted for a moment from the girls, and some of them, noticing, actually thought that their gay banter was offensive, and was what caused the heightened color on her cheeks as she turned back to them.

They could not have understood, even had she tried to explain, that it was a blush of shame over the thought that the one whom possibly she might have won from that home for the Master's service she had forgotten, and reached out after those whom, possibly, she was not sent to reach. Her eyes were open now; she would do what she could to repair blunders.

"Do with him?" she said, going back to Ruth's last question. "We'll accept him, of course, and set him to work; I should not be greatly surprised if he should prove one of the most useful helpers on our list before the winter is over. Look at the snow coming down, and we have a rehearsal to-night; don't you believe he can shovel paths, as well as make fires?"

"Sure enough!" said those girls, and they went away pleased with the addition to the circle of workers, and prepared every one to greet him as a helper.