She moved a little uneasily in her seat on the soft mossy bank up there on the Mountain of Frankincense and a slight mist seemed to cover her eyes. She wiped it away, but somehow she did not feel like looking round at the King. The lovely, graceful trees of frankincense whispered and murmured and rustled around her as the wind moved gently among them and wooed them to response.

Then she looked down at the green valley below her, the “Home Valley,” where she now worked so happily; where her own relatives were already learning to respond to the King of Love, just as she had done. After a long pause she said in a very small, low voice:

“My Lord, is it not very lovely that so many of the inhabitants in the valley down there have been persuaded to become your followers?”

“Very lovely indeed,” he answered at once, in a glad, happy voice, and she could sense the smile on his face as he spoke, but for some reason she still did not want to turn and look at him.

There was silence again for quite some time. Then, still without looking at him, she put out her hand, took his and said in the same low, small voice:

“My Lord, why did you bring me here?”

“I wanted you to see this view,” he answered very gently indeed.

“I am looking at it,” she said, just a little breathlessly. “Tell me, my Lord, what do you see?”

He answered slowly and clearly: “I see the dark places of the earth full of the habitations of cruelty. I see multitudes of human souls fainting and scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd, and I am moved with compassion on them, Grace and Glory.”

After a long time she spoke again, but in a voice so low it was scarcely audible. “I think I understand, my Lord,” she said, and then she trembled, almost as though she were not Grace and Glory away up there on the High Places, but poor little Much-Afraid down in the valley.

“Then, as you have seen what I wanted you to see,” said the King gently, “we can go down to the Valley of Humiliation for the work of today.”

As he spoke he rose and started leaping down the mountainside. Grace and Glory started to follow him as usual, but for the first time since he had brought her to the High Places she found that her “hinds’ feet” were inclined to wobble. So she paused one instant on a little rocky crag and whispered very softly: “Behold me! I am thy little handmaiden, Acceptance-with-Joy.”

Immediately her legs stopped shaking, and, sure-footed as a mountain roe, she leaped after the King down the mountainside, singing as she went:

Entreat me not to leave thee, Lord,

For Oh, I love thee so,

And where thou goest, Lord of Love

There will I also go.

Where’er thou lodgest I will lodge,