"You can't be sorry, for their own sakes, for the little
children who go back to God without knowing anything of this life's
troubles. It's for myself I'm sorry. I never can bring up those times
without the _feeling_ of them coming over me again, and then, as I
tell you, I'm sorry for that poor fool in her empty house, and then in
the thundering freight-car, and then in the hospital. I see her outside
of me just as plain as I would another person. Then, too"--she dried her
eyes as if this time for good--"I feel a burning here"--she touched her
breast--"like anger. Angry. I feel angry at being robbed, in a way I
never seem to get over. To think I might have had him all my life, like
millions of other women, and I never even saw him! And he was as real to
me all those months before!... I don't see how I could have loved him
more than I did. I'm hungry for him sometimes, just as I might be for
food. And then I'm angry and rebellious. But I couldn't tell you against
who. It isn't God, certainly. He's our best friend, all we've got to
rely on. And He's been mighty good to me. There in Denver, when I hadn't
a friend or a penny, He raised up friends for me and gave me the most
wonderful luck.

"I stayed right there in Denver till less than a year ago. I guess
you've heard me speak of the Judge. The doctor in the hospital where
they carried me was his son; that's how it all came about--friends, good
luck, money, everything. When I say I found friends, let me mention that
I found enemies, too, the meanest, the bitterest! I--but there"--she
interrupted herself as, on the very verge of further confidences, a
change of mind was effected in her by sudden weariness or by a deterrent
thought, or both--"I guess I've talked enough about myself for one
evening. I didn't have a soft time of it there in Denver," she summed up
the remainder of her story, "but I'd got back to being my old self.
You'd never have known what I'd been through. I was just about as you've
known me here. Funny, isn't it,"--Aurora seemed almost ashamed,
apologetic,--"how the disposition you're born with hangs on?"

"Golden disposition," Gerald commented soothingly. Timid about looking
directly at her just yet, he looked instead at the portrait, whereon lay
the shadow of the events just related.

After a little period of thought in silence Aurora said, with the
shamefaced air she took when venturing to talk of high things:

"I heard a sermon once on the text, 'Mar