Free Ariel Custer by Grace Livingston Hill Page A

would have been so alone in the world. If anything ever happened to her up here, no one would know. There were dear people at home who would care, who might even worry a little about her if they never heard from her, but none of them would or could leave their homes and their business and come up to look after her. If she got sick or died, she would simply go out as far as this world was concerned. But she could never go out from God’s presence.
    Carrying on these deep thoughts, she came at last to the young man who had picked her up and been so solicitous for her welfare; to the Traveler’s Aid agent, who had been so kind; and to that dear Miss Dillon, who looked so like a little dove. She felt she was going to love Miss Dillon. How nice that she lived nearby. They would often see one another perhaps. Mr. Granniss had pointed out the house where they lived, with the hedge about it, as they passed, when he was showing her the way here. She liked Mr. Granniss. He seemed so strong. It would be fine to have a friend like that. He had nice eyes with deep lights in them like the twinkle of the stars in the old well at home when one leaned over the edge of the stone wall and looked down below the oaken bucket. She wished again she might help him to know and love her Bible.
    She took it up tenderly, brushed off the dust marks on the cover, hunted a little white towel that had not been mussed to spread on the table. Then she put the Bible on it, laid her mother’s old-fashioned gold watch beside it, and drew up the creaking little rocking chair. This was her home, and now with the open Bible it looked more like living.
    She turned over the leaves lightly and again the book fell open to Isaiah. It was heavily underlined in a trembling hand. Her grandmother’s, she knew, and on the margin had been written in fine little letters “Tried and proved.” Many a time had her grandmother told her the story of one of God’s saints who always wrote that on the margin of a promise that he had put to the test. As she read over the familiar words, she felt as if she were walking down the path of her grandmother’s garden and seeing all the blossoms that were so dear to her. It seemed so safe and precious to be reading out of Grandmother’s book words that Grandmother had tried and proved. And to know they were for her. Suddenly she searched in her little handbag and got out the tiny gold pencil that used to be her mother’s and wrote beside her grandmother’s trembling testimony her own “Tried and proved by Ariel also.”
    She turned the leaf and began to read the forty-third chapter. More “fear nots.” On down through the chapter, verse after verse was marked “Tried and proved,” and she set her own initials as she remembered her own leading these last two days.
    Suddenly she came to a verse that seemed to break the thread of thought: “Bring forth the blind people that have eyes, and the deaf that have ears.” How odd. What could it mean? Why—wasn’t that like Mr. Granniss? He had eyes, but he couldn’t see the goodness of God.
    Her eyes dropped down to the tenth verse: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he—”
    It almost seemed as if God, the great God, were speaking to her. Could it be that He meant that He put it into her heart to try to make that young man see what he had not seen before about God? “My witness”! What if she could be God’s witness!
    Her eyes glanced over at the column just back of where she had been reading: “And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them.”
    Stranger and stranger! Didn’t it seem as if the great God were talking it all over and promising her that if she witnessed, He would set His seal of