he
had no Bible; nothing but what her well-stored memory gave her. Ah!
what would have become of Alice Benden in those dark hours, had her
memory been filled with all kinds of folly, and not with the pure,
unerring Word of God? This Psalm exactly suited her.

"Will the Lord absent Himself for ever?--and will He be no more
entreated? Is His mercy clean gone for ever?--and is His promise come
utterly to an end for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious?--and
will He shut up His loving-kindness in displeasure? And I said, It is
mine infirmity: but I will remember the years of the right hand of the
Most Highest."

A light suddenly flashed, clear and warm, into the weak, low, dark heart
of poor lonely Alice. "It is mine infirmity!" Not God's infirmity--not
God's forgetfulness! "No, Alice, never that," it seemed just as if
somebody said to her: "it is only your poor blind heart here in the
dark, that cannot see the joy and deliverance that are coming to you--
that must come to all God's people: but He who dwells in the immortal
light, and beholds the end from the beginning, knows how to come and set
you free--knows when to come and save you."

The tune changed now. Satan was driven away. The enemy whom Alice
Benden had seen that day, and from whom she had suffered so sorely, she
should see again no more for ever. From that hour all was joy and hope.

"I will magnify Thee, O God my King, and praise Thy name for ever and
ever!"

That was the song she sang through her prison bars in the early morning
of the 25th of February. The voice of joy and thanksgiving reached
where the moan of pain had not been able to penetrate, to an intently
listening ear a few yards from the prison. Then an answering voice of
delight came to her from without.

"Alice! Alice! I have found thee!"

Alice looked up, to see her brother Roger's head and shoulders above the
paling which hid all but a strip of sky from her gaze.

"Hast thou been a-searching for me all these weeks, Roger?"

"That have I, my dear heart, ever since thou wast taken from the gaol.
How may I win at thee?"

"That thou canst not, Hodge. But we may talk a moment, for my keeper,
that is the bell-ringer of the minster, is now at his work there, and
will not return for an half-hour well reckoned. Thou wert best come at
those times only, or I fear thou shalt be taken."

"I shall not be taken till God willeth," said Roger. "I will come again
to thee in