Over that card I sang, and I wept; I worked, hoped, prayed, believed!  So much depended upon it!  Could the Christ to whom I dedicated it, fail to answer my prayer for success?  Three hundred dollars!  What a mint!  It would pay the doctor, and make mother comfortable, and get her a warm new suit for coming winter.  Oh! it is so easy to believe in God, until He denies us; and to trust Christ, till He hurls our prayers back, and the stones crush us.  Only three hundred dollars between life and death; between a happy, proud girl with a noble future, and a disgraced, broken-hearted wreck trampled into a convict’s grave!  It would have saved all; all the awful consequences of the journey here, which only dire extremity of need forced upon me.  On the fatal day I started South, I went at the last moment, hoping that some tidings from my card would come on angel wings.  The decision had been made, but the awards were not yet published, and so my doom was sealed.  To-morrow, happy women, no more innocent than I am, will smile at my Christmas card, and give it with warm kisses and loving words to their dear ones; and to-day, my white dove of hope, flies back in my face, with the talons of a harpy, to devour me with maddening reminders of ‘what might have been’.  My coveted three hundred dollars!  Three hundred taunting fiends! to jeer and torment me.  The Christmas sun will shine on a pauper’s empty cot in a charity hospital; on a disgraced, insulted, forsaken convict.  Take away this last mockery, it is more than I can bear.  There on the back in gilt letters—­Prize Card—­Three Hundred Dollars!  Yet a stranger paid for my mother’s coffin, and—.  Three hundred furies to lash my heart out!  Too late!  Take it away! too late! oh, too late!  This is worse than the pangs of death.”

CHAPTER XV.

The Christmas Sabbath dawned cold and dim, and along the eastern sky gray marbled masses of cloud with dun, stratified bases, built themselves into the likeness of vast teocallis to Tonatiuh, over whose apex the struggling rays fell red and presageful.  Dulled by the stained glass windows, the light that filled the semi-circular chapel at “The Lilacs”, was chill and sombre, until the fair sacristan held a taper over the tall wax candles on each side of the altar, whence a mellow radiance soon streamed over all; flashing along the golden letters under the cross, and upon the gilded pipes of the little organ.  On the marble steps in front of the altar were two baskets filled with white camellias, and great spikes of pink and blue hyacinths, that seemed to break their hearts in waves of aromatic incense.  The family Bible of the Gordons lay open, on the reading desk, and upon its yellow pages rested a Maltese cross of snowy Roman hyacinths.  Looping back the purple velvet portiere over the arch leading into the library, Leo sat down on the organ bench to await the coming of the family, leisurely arranged the stops, and marked