inal judgment,
and Norman, without the slightest inclination to be genuinely religious,
was yet a coward, and made a provisional repentance, not meant to hold
good if Elder Hankins's figures should fail; just such a repentance as
many a man has made on what he supposed to be his death-bed. Do not I
remember a panic-stricken man, converted by typhoid fever and myself,
who laughed as soon as he began to eat gruel, to think that he had been
"such a fool as to send for the preacher"?

Now, between Mrs. Anderson's joy at Norman's conversion, and her delight
that the world would soon be at an end and she on the winning side, and
her anticipation of the pleasure she would feel even in heaven in
saying, "I told you so!" to her unbelieving friends, she quite forgot
Julia. In fact she went from one fit of religious catalepsy to another,
falling into trances, or being struck down with what was mysteriously
called "the power." She had relaxed her vigilance about Julia, for
there were but three more hours of time, and she felt that the goal was
already gained, and she had carried her point to the very last. A
satisfaction for a saint!

The neglected Julia naturally floated toward the outer edge of the
surging crowd, and she and August inevitably drifted together.

"Let us go and see Jonas married," said August. "It is no harm. God can
take us to heaven from one place as well as another, if we are His
children."

In truth, Julia was wearied and bewildered, not to say disgusted, with
her mother's peculiar religious exercises, and she gladly escaped with
August to the castle and the wedding of her faithful friends.

Andrew, in a spirit of skeptical defiance, had made his castle look as
flowery and festive as possible. The wedding took place in the lower
story, but the library was illuminated, and the Adventists who had
occasion to pass by Andrew's on their way to the rendezvous accepted
this as a new fulfillment of prophecy to the very letter. They nodded
one to another, and said, "See! marrying and giving in marriage, as in
the days of Noah!"

August and Julia were too much awe-stricken to say much on their way to
the castle. But in these last hours of a world grown old and ready for
its doom, they cleaved closer together. There could be neither heaven
nor millennium for one of them without the other! Loving one another
made them love God the more, and love cast out all fear. If this was the
Last, they would face it together, a