t intervals were all the same to
her. She was heedless of those who came in or who went out, as well as
of those who knelt around the confessionals, except now and then to
wonder, as she chanced to meet some tearful eye, if the world held
another heart so lonely, desolate, hopeless as her own.

Hopeless? She recalled the day when she had beheld the space of blue in
the sky--the hole in the day, Pug-on-a-kesheik, thus termed by her
Chippewa friends--which she had taken as a token that her love for
Hubert was no sin. She recalled the momentary joy that had animated her
as she, in imagination, clasped that love to her heart, as a gain for
her loss, as a balm for her bitter sorrow. She remembered how she had
even dropped upon her knees in thankfulness to heaven for having given
her such a comfort in the midst of her grief. Should _she_ have scruples
when ministers of God had lifted up holy hands and sanctified such
unions? Thus had her first sense of horror been blunted, and blushless
become her keen, womanly shame.

Why then, with a sense of the presence of the glorified spirits of her
uncle and child, assumed that caressed infatuation, that which she had
deemed a higher, nobler love, proportions of gigantic horror? Why had
she spat out as gall and wormwood the sweet morsel she had rolled under
her tongue? Why, giving up her only joy, trampling down with all her
strength and might the one hope of her existence, had she returned to
this strange house, wherein she could but beat her breast and cry out
"unworthy, unworthy"? Was she the first woman who had mistaken dross for
gold; and, finding her error, might not she, like others, fling it aside
for the shining ore that lay in her path? Should her hand still grasp
the piercing thorn, when the rose bloomed temptingly before her?

Thus listened Althea to human sophistry, until God spoke to her through
the lips of the Jesuit priest. And he said, slowly and solemnly,
grasping in his right hand the emblem of our religion:

"And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, let not the
wife depart from her husband. But if she separate, let her remain
unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband; and let not the husband put
away his wife."

Had these words come down from the heavens in tones of thunder they
could not have produced upon Althea a more stunning effect. Was she here
to recognize the hand of God? Had _He_ inspired this priest to speak
upon a subject that was th