let us hope the
angels look tenderly down on the sins of too much love. John felt as
if he would be glad of a chance to die for her; and, when he thought
of her in his prayers, it was because he loved her better than
himself.

As to Lillie, there was an extraordinary sympathy of sentiment between
them at that moment. John was thinking only of her; and she was
thinking only of herself, as was her usual habit,--herself, the one
object of her life, the one idol of her love.

Not that she knew, in so many words, that she, the little, frail
bit of dust and ashes that she was, was her own idol, and that she
appeared before her Maker, in those solemn walls, to draw to herself
the homage and the attention that was due to God alone; but yet it was
true that, for years and years, Lillie's unconfessed yet only motive
for appearing in church had been the display of herself, and the
winning of admiration.

But is she so much worse than others?--than the clergyman who uses
the pulpit and the sacred office to show off his talents?--than the
singers who sing God's praises to show their voices,--who intone the
agonies of their Redeemer, or the glories of the _Te Deum_, confident
on the comments of the newspaper press on their performance the next
week? No: Lillie may be a little sinner, but not above others in this
matter.

"Lillie," said John to her after dinner, assuming a careless,
matter-of-course air, "would you like to drive with me over to
Spindlewood, and see my Sunday school?"

"_Your_ Sunday school, John? Why, bless me! do _you_ teach Sunday
school?"

"Certainly I do. Grace and I have a school of two hundred children and
young people belonging to our factories. I am superintendent."

"I never did hear of any thing so odd!" said Lillie. "What in the
world can you want to take all that trouble for,--go basking over
there in the hot sun, and be shut up with a room full of those
ill-smelling factory-people? Why, I'm sure it can't be your duty! I
wouldn't do it for the world. Nothing would tempt me. Why, gracious,
John, you might catch small-pox or something!"

"Pooh! Lillie, child, you don't know any thing about them. They are
just as cleanly and respectable as anybody."

"Oh, well! they may be. But these Irish and Germans and Swedes and
Danes, and all that low class, do smell so,--you needn't tell me,
now!--that working-class smell is a thing that can't be disguised."

"But, Lillie, these are our people. They are th