ister, ruinous to Harold, regardless of his widowed mother,
reckless of his God--that each one seemed to cut into him with a sense of
its own badness, and he was quite as much grieved as afraid; he hated the
fault, and hated himself for it.

Indeed, he was growing less afraid, for the sorrow seemed to swallow that
up; the grief at having offended One so loving was putting out the terror
of being punished; or rather, when he thought that this illness was
punishment, he was almost glad to have some of what he deserved; just as
when he was a little boy, he really used to be happier afterwards for
having been whipped and put in the corner, because that was like making
it up. Though he knew very well that if he had ten thousand times worse
than this to bear, it would not be making up for his faults, and he felt
now that one of them had been his 'despising the chastening of the Lord.'
And then the thought of what had made up for it would come: and though he
had known of it all his life, and heeded it all too little, now that his
heart was tender, and he had felt some of the horror and pain of sin, he
took it all home now, and clung to it. He recollected the verses about
that One kneeling--nay, falling on the ground, in the cold dewy night,
with the chosen friends who could not watch with Him, and the agony and
misery that every one in all the world deserved to feel, gathering on
Him, Who had done no wrong, and making His brow stream with great drops
of Blood.

And the tortures, the shame, the slow Death--circumstance after
circumstance came to his mind, and 'for me,' 'this fault of mine helped,'
would rise with it, and the tears trickled down at the thought of the
suffering and of the Love that had caused it to be undergone.

Once he raised up his head, and saw through the window the deep dark-blue
sky, and the stars, twinkling and sparkling away; that pale band of
light, the Milky Way, which they say is made of countless stars too far
off to be distinguished, and looking like a cloud, and on it the larger,
brighter burnished stars, differing from one another in glory. He
thought of some lines in a book Miss Jane once gave Ellen, which said of
the stars:

'The Lord resigned them all to gain
The bliss of pardoning thee.'

And when he thought that it was the King of those stars Who was scourged
and spit on, and for the sake of _his_ faults, the loving tears came
again, and he turned to another hymn of Ellen's: