urn to some chapter that seemed to her frail
judgment to contain words of wider comfort to the children of men than
a genealogical tree of the Children of Israel; but she had never yielded
to so unworthy an impulse. Who was she that she should suggest that
one part of the Sacred Book was calculated to be more profitable than
another? Was it not all the Bible?

She had plowed her way through the slough of Hebrew names upon these
occasions, and the blessing of the words had been borne to her in the
form of a sweet sleep.

Her chapter for this night was that which describes the campaign of
David, during which he and his hosts were besieged in their earthworks,
and how the three mighty men had made a sortie through the camp of the
enemy in order to obtain for their leader a cup of water.

She continued the chapter to the end, but all through it those words
were ringing in her ears:

"It is the price of blood; it is the price of blood."

And as she knelt down beside her bed, her bare white feet peeping out
from beneath the drapery of her white night-dress, in a posture
that would have made the most human atheist believe in the beauty of
devotion, those words were still in her ears: "The price of blood; the
price of blood."

Good Heavens! How could she carry that feather fan? How could Ella
Linton hold it up to her face--hold her face down to it, flutter
its fairy fluff upon her cheeks? It was the price of blood. Herbert
Courtland had run a greater risk to obtain those feathers than David's
mighty men had run to draw the water from the well. She had heard all
about the insatiable savagery of the natives of New Guinea. Paradise?
Who had named those birds the birds of paradise? She recollected how
the feathers which Ella had whirled about had held in the very center of
every wonderful disc of rich purple, edged with unequal radiating lines
of gold, a single spot of brilliant crimson, with a tiny star of silver
in the center. The effect of the sunlight glinting over this combination
on the thousand feathers that swept after the bird had caused Herbert
Courtland, the first white man who had seen this glory of glories, to
call it the meteor-bird. But those crimson drops: were they not the
blood of the men who had perished miserably while endeavoring to wrest
its marvels from the tropical forests of that great island?

Paradise?

And Ella could treat those feathers as though they had been plucked from
a tame pheasant? And