“If it weren’t for them!  If I hadn’t let them suffer and die!”

“Do you think He takes all this care of you,—­lets them die for you even,—­and don’t take as much for them?  Do you think they ain’t glad and happy now?  Do you think you could have hurt them, if you had tried,—­and you didn’t try, you only let them alone a little, forgetting?  It says, ’If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and He is the propitiation.’  If we have somebody to take part with us against our sins, how much more against our mistakes,—­our forgettings! and they are the propitiation, too; their angels—­the Christ of them—­do always behold the face of the Father.  Their interceding is a part of the Lord’s interceding.”

“If I could once more be let to do something for them—­their very selves!”

“You can.  You can pray, ’Lord give them some beautiful heavenly joy this day that thou knowest of, for my asking; because I cannot any more do for them on the earth.’  And then you can turn round to their errands again.”

Marion stood up on her feet.

“I will say that prayer for them every day!  I shall believe in it, because you told me.  If I had thought of it myself, I should not have dared.  But He wouldn’t send such a message by you if He didn’t mean it; would He?”

She believed in the God of Luclarion Grapp, as the children of Israel believed in the God of Abraham.

“He never sends any message that He doesn’t mean.  He means the comfort, just as much as He does the blaming.”

Another day, a while after, Marion came down to Neighbor Street with something very much on her mind to say, and to ask about.  They had all waited for her own plans to suggest themselves, or rather for her work to be given her to do.  No one had mentioned, or urged, or even asked anything as to what she should do next.

But now it came of itself.

“Couldn’t I get a place in some asylum, or hospital, do you think, Miss Grapp?  To be anything—­an under nurse, or housemaid, or a cook to make gruels?  So that I could do for poor women and little children?  That would seem to come the very nearest.  I’d come here, if you wanted me; but I think I should like best to take care of poor, good women, whose children had died, or gone away; who haven’t any one to look after them except asylum people.  I like to treat them as if they were all my mothers; and especially to wait on any little girls that might be sick.”

Was this the same Marion Kent who had given her whole soul, a little while ago, to fine dressing and public appearing, and having her name on placards?  Had all that life dropped off from her so easily?

Ah, you call it easily! She knew, how, passing through the furnace, it had been burned away; shriveled and annihilated with the fierce, hot sweep of a spiritual flame before which all old, unworthy desire vanishes:—­the living, awful breath of remorse.