MATCHED PEARLS by Grace Livingston Hill Page A

might she could not find a Bible. It was not in its numbered place. Somebody had likely drawn it out for reference, or perhaps from disuse it had become lost. Anyway she couldn’t find it.
    “Oh dear!” she said aloud, thinking no one was in the great empty room but herself. Of course it was late in the afternoon and so near to commencement that nobody would be consulting the library now. “Now what shall I do?”
    “You want something?” It was the old janitor who appeared from behind a book alcove, duster in hand.
    “Oh, I want to find a Bible, Emil, but you wouldn’t know where they keep it. Is the librarian coming back soon?”
    “Her gone for de weekend,” said Emil. “What you want? Whole Bible? I got Testament right here. That do?” He put his hand into the gingham pocket of his jumper and brought forth a cheap little Testament.
    “It’s John,” said Constance. “Yes, John is the New Testament, isn’t it? John three-sixteen.”
    “Oh, yah! Him! I know him. Gott so luve de worll’—” He opened the little book and there was the verse right before her as if it had been much opened at that place.
    Constance seized the book.
    “Oh, thank you. I’ll bring it back as soon as I can.”
    “Keep so long as you need,” said the old man, smiling. “I like lend.”
    As she hurried back to the hospital, Constance marveled that the janitor should be carrying a Testament. He was perhaps the last one to whom she would have thought of applying for a Bible, and perhaps the only one in the building who had one. It seemed a special providence that he should have been there. And he knew the verse! How strange! Were there perhaps more people in the world than she dreamed who lived by the Bible, who knew God? By the look of the light in his face when he had brought out that worn little Testament, she had a feeling that this old man was somehow akin to the man of the hillside who had brought her the flowers. What an odd idea to float through her head.
    Before she entered Doris’s room again, she paused to read the verse Seagrave had given her, and as she opened the door Doris cried out eagerly:
    “Did you get someone? Is he coming?”
    “Yes, dear,” said Constance, her voice vibrating with hope. “I got him on the telephone. He’s coming just as fast as possible. But it is a long distance to come. You’ll have to be patient. He has sent you something to help though. Listen. He said it was the words of Jesus, God’s Son, and I was to tell you to trust them utterly.”
    Doris fixed bright, haggard eyes upon her face, eyes that had already begun to have that other-world look, and from which gaunt terror driven by pain looked forth to a world that could no longer help nor satisfy.
    “Read!” she commanded with quivering lips.
    Constance read: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
    “Read it again.”
    Constance read it again, and yet again, and then her eyes catching a word or two of what followed, read on: “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”
    “What does it mean, Connie?” The bright eyes searched her face, and Constance’s heart was wrung. She wanted so much to be of help, and she knew so little. She tried to think what Seagrave had told her in their brief talk on the hillside, but it was all vague.
    “Just what it says,” she answered simply. “At least it sounds that way to me, and that’s what he told me to tell you. Just take Him at His word and believe it.”
    “Read it again!” pleaded the voice that was weak with pain.
    So Constance read it again and again, over and over; and the brilliant eyes were fixed on her face, drinking in the words, trying to puzzle some comfort from it.
    “If she could only get a bit of sleep,” whispered the nurse. But the sharpened senses of the sufferer heard her.
    “No!”