d its startling resemblance
to one in whom I have long felt an interest, must plead my pardon. I am
grateful, sir, for your courtesy, and will detain you no longer."

He bowed profoundly; she bent her head, and walked quickly away,
keeping her face lowered, dreading observation.

For the first time since her trial and conviction, a sensation of
perfect tranquillity shed rest upon her anxious and foreboding heart.
Bertie was safe from capture, on foreign soil; and the testimony of the
traveller that he prayed in the solitude of the wilderness, brought her
the comforting assurance, that the fires of remorse had begun the
purification of his sinful soul from the crime that had blackened so
many lives. Trained in his early youth at a Jesuit College, his
sympathies had ever been with the priesthood to whom his tutors
belonged; and his sister readily understood how swiftly he fled to
their penitential, expiatory system, when the blood of his grandfather
had stained his hands, and the scouts of the law hunted him to desert
wilds.

Vain of the personal beauty that had always distinguished him, she
comprehended the keenness of the humiliation, which would goad him to
screen in a cloister, the facial mutilation, that punished him more
excruciatingly than hair shirt, or flagellation. Beyond the reach of
extradition (as she fondly hoped), inviolate beneath the cowl of some
Order which, in protecting his body, essayed also to cleanse,
regenerate and sanctify his imperilled soul, could she not now dismiss
the tormenting apprehension that sleeping or waking had persistently
dogged her, since the day when she saw the fuchsias on the
handkerchief, and the mother-of-pearl grapes on the sleeve button, in
the penitentiary cell?

In a crisis of dire extremity, overborne by adversity, terrified by the
realization of human helplessness, we fly to God, and barter by promise
all our future, for the boon of temporary succor.

How different, how holy the mood that brings us in tearful gratitude to
dedicate our lives to His service, when having abandoned all hope, His
healing hand lifts us out of long agony into unexpected rest?

When an ignominious death stared this woman in the face, she had cried
to her God: "Though You slay me, yet will I trust You!" and to-night
she bowed her head in prayer, thankful that the uplifted hand held no
longer a dagger, but had fallen tenderly in benediction.

Far away in the heart of the city, the clock in