dered a
telegram to be sent to her father at Birmingham, but Mrs. Craigie and
Tom were out for the evening, and no one knew where they were to be
found. He and the landlady had been alone.

"She spoke constantly of you," he continued. "The very last words she
said were these, 'Tell Erica that only love can keep from bitterness,
that love is stronger than the world's unkindness.' Then, after a
minute's pause, she added, 'Be good to my little girl, promise to be
good to her.' After that, speech became impossible, but I do not think
she suffered. Once she motioned to me to give her the frame off the
mantlepiece with your photograph; she looked at it and kept it near
her--she died with it in her hand."

Erica hid her face; that one trifling little incident was too much for
her, the tears rained down between her fingers. That it should have come
to that! No one whom she loved there at the last--but she had looked
at the photograph, had held it to the very end, the voiceless, useless
picture had been there, the real Erica had been laughing and talking
at Paris! Brian talked on slowly, soothingly. Presently he paused; then
Erica suddenly looked up, and dashing away her tears, said, in a voice
which was terrible in its mingled pain and indignation.

"I might have been here! I might have been with her! It is the fault of
that wretched man who went bankrupt; the fault of the bigots who will
not treat us fairly--who ruin us!"

She sobbed with passionate pain, a vivid streak of crimson dyed her
cheek, contrasting strangely with the deathly whiteness of her brow.

"Forgive me if I pain you," said Brian; "but have you forgotten the
message I gave you? 'It is only love that can keep from bitterness!'"

"Love!" cried Erica; she could have screamed it, if she had not been so
physically exhausted. "Do you mean I am to love our enemies?"

"It is only the love of all humanity that can keep from bitterness,"
said Brian.

Erica began to think over his reply, and in thinking grew calm once
more. By and by she lifted up her face; it was pale again now, and
still, and perfectly hopeless.

"I suppose you think that only Christians can love all humanity," she
said, a little coldly.

"I should call all true lovers of humanity Christians," replied Brian,
"whether they are consciously followers of Christ or not."

She thought a little; then with a curiously hard look in her face, she
suddenly flashed round upon him with a question, much