“‘Now look here!’ says Tipps.  ’You’re calmed down a little.  If you’ll stay calm, and come with me, I’ll take you to a safe place.  If you don’t, I’ll call a policeman, and you’ll go to the lock-up.  Which’ll ye have?’ ‘You’ve got me,’ she said, in a kind of a sulk.  ’I s’pose you’ll do what you like with me.  That’s the way of it.  Anybody can be as bad and as miserable as they please, but they won’t be let out of it.  It’s hell, I tell you,—­this very world.  And folks don’t know they’ve got there.’

“Tipps says there’s hopes of her from just that word bad.  She wouldn’t have put that in, otherways.  Well, he brought her here, and the baby.  And they’re both up-stairs.  She’s as weak as water, now the drink is out of her.  But it wasn’t all drink.  The desperation is in her eyes, though it’s give way, and helpless.  And what to do with ’em next, I don’t know.”

“I do,” said Desire, with her eyes full.  “She must be comforted up.  And then, Mr. Vireo must know, the first thing.  Afterwards, he will see.”

Luclarion took Desire up-stairs.

The girl was lying, in a clean night-dress, in a clean, white bed.  Her hair, dark and beautiful, was combed and braided away from her face, and lay back, in two long, heavy plaits, across the pillow.  Her features were sharp, but delicate, and were meant to have been pretty.  But her eyes!  Out of them a suffering demon seemed to look, with a still, hopeless rage.

Desire came up to the bedside.

“What do you want?” the girl said, slowly, with a deep, hard, resentful scorn in her voice.  “Have you come to see what it is all like?  Do you want to feel how clean you are beside me?  That’s a part of it; the way they torment.”

It was like the cry of the devil out of the man against the Son of God.

“No,” said Desire, just as slowly, in her turn.  “I can only feel the cleanness in you that is making you suffer against the sin.  The badness doesn’t belong to you.  Let it go, and begin again.”

It was the word of the Lord,—­“Hold thy peace, and come out of him.”  Desire Ledwith spoke as she was that minute moved of the Spirit.  The touch of power went down through all the misery and badness, to the woman’s soul, that knew itself to be just clean enough for agony.  She turned her eyes, with the fiery gloom in them, away, pressing her forehead down against the pillow.

“God sees it better than I do,” said Desire, gently.

An arm flung itself out from under the bedclothes, thrusting them off.  The head rolled itself over, with the face away.

“God!  Pf!”

So far from Him; and yet so close, in the awful hold of his unrelaxing love!

Desire kept silence; she could not force upon her the thought, the Name:  the Name for whose hallowing to pray, is to pray for the holiness in ourselves that alone can make it tender.

“What do you know about God?” the voice asked defiantly, the face still turned away.