red
in a place where nothing changed, years passed away on earth, and
she heard her name less frequently mentioned. But one day a sigh
reached her ear, and the words, "Inge! Inge! what a grief thou hast
been to me! I said it would be so." It was the last sigh of her
dying mother.

After this, Inge heard her kind mistress say, "Ah, poor Inge!
shall I ever see thee again? Perhaps I may, for we know not what may
happen in the future." But Inge knew right well that her mistress
would never come to that dreadful place.

Time-passed--a long bitter time--then Inge heard her name
pronounced once more, and saw what seemed two bright stars shining
above her. They were two gentle eyes closing on earth. Many years
had passed since the little girl had lamented and wept about "poor
Inge." That child was now an old woman, whom God was taking to
Himself. In the last hour of existence the events of a whole life
often appear before us; and this hour the old woman remembered how,
when a child, she had shed tears over the story of Inge, and she
prayed for her now. As the eyes of the old woman closed to earth,
the eyes of the soul opened upon the hidden things of eternity, and
then she, in whose last thoughts Inge had been so vividly present, saw
how deeply the poor girl had sunk. She burst into tears at the
sight, and in heaven, as she had done when a little child on earth,
she wept and prayed for poor Inge. Her tears and her prayers echoed
through the dark void that surrounded the tormented captive soul,
and the unexpected mercy was obtained for it through an angel's tears.
As in thought Inge seemed to act over again every sin she had
committed on earth, she trembled, and tears she had never yet been
able to weep rushed to her eyes. It seemed impossible that the gates
of mercy could ever be opened to her; but while she acknowledged
this in deep penitence, a beam of radiant light shot suddenly into the
depths upon her. More powerful than the sunbeam that dissolves the man
of snow which the children have raised, more quickly than the
snowflake melts and becomes a drop of water on the warm lips of a
child, was the stony form of Inge changed, and as a little bird she
soared, with the speed of lightning, upward to the world of mortals. A
bird that felt timid and shy to all things around it, that seemed to
shrink with shame from meeting any living creature, and hurriedly
sought to conceal itself in a dark corner of an old ruined wall; there