LITMIR.BIZ

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despairing emotion. The only comfort she had received through all those dreary months sprang from the helpful sympathy of Dr. Spenlove; apart from, that she had never been buoyed up by a ray of light, had never been cheered by the hope of a brighter day. Her one prevailing thought was that she would be better dead than alive. She did not court death; she waited for it, and silently prayed that it would come soon. It was not from the strength of inward moral support that she had the courage to live on; it was simply that she had schooled herself into the belief that before or when her child was born death would release her from the horrors of life. Young as she was she so fostered this hope that it became a conviction, and she looked forward to the end with dull resignation. "If I live till my baby is born," she thought, "I pray that it may die with me."

      Here was the case of a woman without the moral support which springs from faith in any kind of religion. In some few mortals such faith is intuitive, but in most instances it requires guidance and wise direction in childhood. Often it degenerates into bigotry and intolerance, and assumes the hateful narrow form of condemning to perdition all who do not subscribe to its own particular creed. Pagans are as worthy of esteem as the bigots who arrogate to themselves the monopoly of heavenly rewards.

      Mrs. Turner was neither pagan nor bigot; she was a nullity. Her religious convictions had not yet taken shape, and though, if she had been asked "Are you a Christian?" she would have replied, "Oh yes, I am a Christian," she would have been unable to demonstrate in what way she was a Christian, or what she understood by the term. In this respect many thousands of human beings resemble her.

      Faith is strength, mightier than the sword, mightier than the pen, mightier than all the world's store of gold and precious stones; and when this strength is displayed in the sweetness of resignation, and in submission to the Divine will which chastens human life with sorrow, its influence upon the passions is sustaining, and purifying, and sublime. If Mrs. Turner had been blessed with faith which displayed itself in this direction, she would have been the happier for it, and hard as were her trials, she would to the last have looked forward with hope instead of despair.

      The story related by Mr. Gordon to Dr. Spenlove was true in every particular. There was no distortion or exaggeration; he had done for Mrs. Turner and her father all that he said he had done. He had not mentioned the word "love" in connection with the woman he had asked to be his wife. She, on her part, had no such love for him as that which should bind a man and a woman in a life-long tie; she held him in respect and esteem-that was all. But she had accepted him, and had contemplated the future with satisfaction until, until-

      Until a man crossed her path who wooed her in different fashion, and who lavished upon her flatteries and endearments which made her false to the promise she had given. For this man she had deserted the home which Mr. Gordon had provided for her, and had deserted it in such a fashion that she could never return to it, could never again be received in it, and this without a word of explanation to the man she had deceived. She was in her turn deceived, and she awoke from her dream to find herself a lost and abandoned woman. In horror she fled from him, and cast her lot among strangers, knowing full well that she would meet with unbearable contumely among those to whom she was known. Hot words had passed between her and her betrayer, and in her anger she had written letters to him which in the eyes of the law would have released him from any obligation it might otherwise have imposed upon him. He was well pleased with this, and he smiled as he put those letters in a place of safety-to be brought forward only in case she annoyed him. She did nothing of the kind; her scorn for him was so profound that she was content to release him unconditionally. So she passed out of his life as he passed out of hers. Neither of these beings, the betrayed or the betrayer, reckoned with the future; neither of them gave a thought to the probability that the skeins of Fate, which to-day separated them as surely as if they had lived at opposite poles of the earth, might at some future time bring them together again, and that the pages of the book which they believed was closed for ever might be reopened for weal or woe.

      The child's moans aroused the mother from her lethargy. She had no milk to give the babe; nature's founts were dry, and she went from door to door in the house in which she lived to beg for food. She returned as she went, empty-handed, and the child continued to moan.

      Dr. Spenlove, her only friend, had bidden her farewell. She had not a penny in her pocket; there was not a crust of bread in the cupboard, not an ounce of coal, not a stick of wood to kindle a fire. She was thinly clad, and she did not possess a single article upon which she could have obtained the smallest advance. She had taken the room furnished, but even if what it contained had been her property a broker would have given but a few shillings for everything in it.

      The little hand instinctively wandered to the mother's wasted breast, and plucked at it imploringly, ravenously. The woman looked around in the last throes of an anguish too deep for expression, except in the appalling words to which she gave despairing utterance.

      "Come," she cried, "we will end it!"

      Out into the cold streets she crept, unobserved. She shivered, and a pitiful smile crossed her lips.

      "Hush, hush!" she murmured to her babe. "It will soon be over. Better dead-better dead-for you and for me!"

      She crept towards the sea, and hugged the wall when she heard approaching footsteps. She need not have feared; the night was too inclement for any but selfish consideration. The soft snow fell, and enwrapped her and her child in its pitiless shroud. She paused by a lamp-post, and cast an upward look at the heavens, in which she could see the glimmering of the stars. Then she went on, and fretfully pressed her babe close to her breast, to stifle the feeble sobs.

      "Be still, be still!" she murmured. "There is no hope in life for either of us. Better dead-better dead!"

      CHAPTER VI

      THE FRIEND IN NEED

      Desperately resolved as she was to carry her fatal design into execution she had not reckoned with nature. Weakened by the life of privation she had led for so many months, and also by the birth of her child, her physical forces had reached the limit of human endurance. She faltered and staggered, the ground slipped from beneath her weary feet. Vain was the struggle, her vital power was spent. From her overcharged heart a voiceless and terrible prayer went up to heaven. "Give me strength, O God, give me but a little strength! I have not far to go!" She fought the air with her disengaged hand, and tossed her head this way and that; but her ruthless prayer was not answered, and though she struggled fiercely she managed to crawl only a few more steps. She had yet hundreds of yards to go to reach the sea when some chord within her seemed to snap; her farther progress was instantly arrested, and she found herself incapable of moving backward or forward. Swaying to and fro, the earth, the sky the whirling snow, and the dim light of the stars swam in her sight and faded from before her. In that supreme moment she saw a spiritual vision of her dishonoured life. Deprived early of a mother's counsel and companionship, she had passed her days with a spendthrift father, whose love for her was so tainted with selfishness that it was not only valueless, but mischievous. When she grew to woman's estate she was worse than alone; she had no guide, no teacher, to point out the rocks and shoals of maidenhood, to inculcate in her the principles of virtue which would act as a safeguard against the specious wiles of men whose eyes were charmed by her beauty, and whose only aim was to lure her to ruin. Then her father died, and a friend came forward who offered her a home and an honourable position in the world. Friendless and penniless, she accepted him, and gave him her promise, and accepted his money. Love had not touched her heart; she thought it had when a wilier man wooed her in another and more alluring fashion, and by this man she had been beguiled and betrayed. Then she knew what she had lost, but it was too late; her good name was gone, and she fled to a strange part of the country and lived among strangers, a heartbroken, despairing woman. All the salient features in her career flashed before her. She saw the man who had trusted her, she saw the man in whom she put her trust, she saw herself, an abandoned creature, with a child of shame in her arms. These ghostly figures stood clearly limned in that one last moment of swiftly fading light, as in the moment of sunrise on a frosty morning every distant object stands sharply outlined against the sky; then darkness fell upon her, and with an inarticulate, despairing cry, she sank to the ground in a deathlike swoon. The wind sobbed and shrieked and wailed around her and her child; the falling snow, with treacherous tenderness, fell softly upon them; herself

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