d have mercy on her poor sinful soul!"

Dudley Venner prayed that night that he might be forgiven, if he had
failed in any act of duty or kindness to this unfortunate child of his,
now freed from all the woes born with her and so long poisoning her
soul. He thanked God for the brief interval of peace which had been
granted her, for the sweet communion they had enjoyed in these last
days, and for the hope of meeting her with that other lost friend in a
better world.

Helen mingled a few broken thanks and petitions with her tears: thanks
that she had been permitted to share the last days and hours of this
poor sister in sorrow; petitions that the grief of bereavement might be
lightened to the lonely parent and the faithful old servant.

Old Sophy said almost nothing, but sat day and night by her dead
darling. But sometimes her anguish would find an outlet in strange
sounds, something between a cry and a musical note,--such as noise had
ever heard her utter before. These were old remembrances surging up from
her childish days, coming through her mother from the cannibal chief,
her grandfather,--death-wails, such as they sing in the mountains of
Western Africa, when they see the fires on distant hill-sides and know
that their own wives and children are undergoing the fate of captives.

The time came when Elsie was to be laid by her mother in the small
square marked by the white stone.

It was not unwillingly that the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had
relinquished the duty of conducting the service to the Reverend Doctor
Honeywood, in accordance with Elsie's request. He could not, by any
reasoning, reconcile his present way of thinking with a hope for the
future of his unfortunate parishioner. Any good old Roman Catholic
priest, born and bred to his faith and his business, would have found a
loophole into some kind of heaven for her, by virtue of his doctrine of
"invincible ignorance," or other special proviso; but a recent convert
cannot enter into the working conditions of his new creed. Beliefs must
be lived in for a good while, before they accommodate themselves to the
soul's wants, and wear loose enough to be comfortable.

The Reverend Doctor had no such scruples. Like thousands of those who
are classed nominally with the despairing believers, he had never prayed
over a departed brother or sister without feeling and expressing a
guarded hope that there was mercy in store for the poor sinner, whom
parents, wives, ch