the frightened Julia than to God. She would
have been terribly afflicted had her petition been granted.

Julia would have run away from the admonition which followed the prayer,
had it not been that Mrs. Anderson adroitly put it under cover of a
religious exhortation. She besought Julia to repent, and then, affecting
to show her her sinfulness, she proceeded to abuse her.

Had Julia no temper? Yes, she had doubtless a spice of her mother's
anger without her meanness. She would have resisted, but that from
childhood she had felt paralyzed by the utter uselessness of all
resistance. The bravest of the villagers at the foot of Vesuvius never
dreamed of stopping the crater's mouth.

But, happily, at last Mrs. Anderson's insane wrath went a little too
far.

"You poor lost sinner," she said, "to think you should go to destruction
under my very eyes, disgracing us all, by running over the country at
night with bad men! But there's mercy even for such as you."

Julia would not have understood the full meaning of this aspersion of
her purity, had she not caught Humphreys's eye. His expression, half
sneer, half leer, seemed to give her mother's saying its full
interpretation. She put out her hand. She turned white, and said: "Say
one word more, and I will go away from you and never come back! Never!"
And then she sat down and cried, and then Mrs. Anderson's maternal love,
her "unloving love," revived. To have her daughter leave her, too, would
be a sort of defeat. She hushed, and sat down in her splint-bottomed
rocking-chair, which snapped when she rocked, and which seemed to speak
for her after she had shut her mouth. Her face settled into a
martyr-like appeal to Heaven in proof of the justice of her cause. And
then she fell back on her forlorn hope. She wept hysterically, in
sincere self-pity, to think that an affectionate mother should have such
a daughter!

Julia, finding that her mother had desisted, went to her room. She did
not exactly pray, but she talked to herself as she paced the floor. It
was a monologue, and yet there was a conscious appeal to an invisible
Presence, who could not misjudge her, and so she passed from talking to
herself to talking to God, and that without any of the formality of
prayer. Her mother had made God seem to be against her. Now she, like
David, protested her innocence to God. She recited half to herself, and
yet also to God--for is not every appeal to one's conscience in some
sense an