u've got me,' she said, in a kind of a sulk.
'I s'pose you'll do what you like with me. That's the way of it.
Anybody can be as bad and as miserable as they please, but they
won't be let out of it. It's hell, I tell you,--this very world. And
folks don't know they've got there.'

"Tipps says there's hopes of her from just that word bad. She
wouldn't have put that in, otherways. Well, he brought her here, and
the baby. And they're both up-stairs. She's as weak as water, now
the drink is out of her. But it wasn't all drink. The desperation is
in her eyes, though it's give way, and helpless. And what to do with
'em next, I _don't_ know."

"I do," said Desire, with her eyes full. "She must be comforted up.
And then, Mr. Vireo must know, the first thing. Afterwards, he will
see."

Luclarion took Desire up-stairs.

The girl was lying, in a clean night-dress, in a clean, white bed.
Her hair, dark and beautiful, was combed and braided away from her
face, and lay back, in two long, heavy plaits, across the pillow.
Her features were sharp, but delicate, and were meant to have been
pretty. But her eyes! Out of them a suffering demon seemed to look,
with a still, hopeless rage.

Desire came up to the bedside.

"What do you want?" the girl said, slowly, with a deep, hard,
resentful scorn in her voice. "Have you come to see what it is all
like? Do you want to feel how clean you are beside me? That's a part
of it; the way they torment."

It was like the cry of the devil out of the man against the Son of
God.

"No," said Desire, just as slowly, in her turn. "I can only feel the
cleanness in you that is making you suffer against the sin. The
badness doesn't belong to you. Let it go, and begin again."

It was the word of the Lord,--"Hold thy peace, and come out of him."
Desire Ledwith spoke as she was that minute moved of the Spirit. The
touch of power went down through all the misery and badness, to the
woman's soul, that knew itself to be just clean enough for agony.
She turned her eyes, with the fiery gloom in them, away, pressing
her forehead down against the pillow.

"God sees it better than I do," said Desire, gently.

An arm flung itself out from under the bedclothes, thrusting them
off. The head rolled itself over, with the face away.

"God! Pf!"

So far from Him; and yet so close, in the awful hold of his
unrelaxing love!

Desire kept silence; she could not force upon her the thought, the
Name: the Name for