inflict immortal pains,
Dyed in the blood of damned souls."

This last verse was a duet, and not a trio. Myrtle closed her lips while
it was singing, and when it was done threw down the book with a look of
anger and disgust. The hunted soul was at bay.

"I won't sing such words," she said, "and I won't stay here to hear them
sung. The boys in the streets say just such words as that, and I am not
going to sing them. You can't scare me into being good with your cruel
hymn-book!"

She could not swear: she was not a boy. She would not cry: she felt
proud, obdurate, scornful, outraged. All these images, borrowed from the
holy Inquisition, were meant to frighten her--and had simply irritated
her. The blow of a weapon that glances off, stinging, but not
penetrating, only enrages. It was a moment of fearful danger to her
character, to her life itself.

Without heeding the cries of the two women, she sprang up-stairs to her
hanging chamber. She threw open the window and looked down into the
stream. For one moment her head swam with the sudden, overwhelming,
almost maddening thought that came over her,--the impulse to fling
herself headlong into those running waters and dare the worst these
dreadful women had threatened her with. Something she often thought
afterwards it was an invisible hand held her back during that brief
moment, and the paroxysm--just such a paroxysm as throws many a young
girl into the Thames or the Seine--passed away. She remained looking, in
a misty dream, into the water far below. Its murmur recalled the whisper
of the ocean waves. And through the depths it seemed as if she saw into
that strange, half--remembered world of palm-trees and white robes and
dusky faces, and amidst them, looking upon her with ineffable love and
tenderness, until all else faded from her sight, the face of a fair
woman,--was it hers, so long, long dead, or that dear young mother's who
was to her less a recollection than a dream?

Could it have been this vision that soothed her, so that she unclasped
her hands and lifted her bowed head as if she had heard a voice
whispering to her from that unknown world where she felt there was a
spirit watching over her? At any rate, her face was never more serene
than when she went to meeting with the two maiden ladies on the following
day, Sunday, and heard the Rev. Mr. Stoker preach a sermon from Luke vii.
48, which made both the women shed tears, but especially so