“Yes, she was a bright, promising, true-hearted girl; but you see she went wrong, and the sinner has to pay both here and hereafter.”

“Don’t,” I hotly cried.  “Don’t go on! don’t!  Sin? sin?  Don’t hurl that word at her, the embodiment of self-sacrifice!  Sin? where there is no law, there can be no sin.  And who had taught her anything?  She was a heathen.  So far as one person can be the cause of another person’s wrong-doing, so far was Semantha’s mother the guilty cause of Semantha’s loving fall.  She was a heathen.  She had been taught just one law—­that she was always to serve other people.  That law she truly kept unto the end.  Of that great book, the Bible, closely packed with all sustaining promises, she knew naught.  I tell you the only Bible she ever held within her hand was that mimic one of marble her father carved for me.  She was a heathen.  Of that all-enduring One—­’chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely,’ for whom there was no thing too small to love, no sin too great to pardon—­she knew nothing.  Even that woman who with wide-open, lustrous eyes had boldly broken every law human and divine, yet was forgiven her uncounted sins, because of her loving faith and true repentance, Semantha knew not of, nor of repentance nor its necessity, nor its power.

“Let her alone!  I say, she was a heathen.  But even so, God made her.  God placed her; and if she fell by the wayside in ignorance, she did not fall from the knowledge of her Maker.”