" said Copas with a glance at him, "you'll have to get
used to it again, and good luck to you! What says the pessimist,
that American fellow?--"

'Nowhere to go but out,
Nowhere to come but back '--

"Missy don't agree with her fellow-countryman, eh?"

His eye held a twinkle of mischief.

"He _isn't_ my fellow-countryman!" Corona protested vehemently.
"I'm English--amn't I, Daddy?"

"There, there--forgive me, little one! And you really don't want to
leave us, just yet?"

"Leave you?" The child took Brother Bonaday's hand and hugged it
close. "Uncle Copas, if you won't laugh I want to tell you
something--what they call confessing." She hesitated for a moment.
"Haven't you ever felt you've got something inside, and how awful
good it is to confess and get it off your chest?"

Brother Copas gave a start, and eyed his fellow-Protestant.

"Well?" he said after a pause.

"Well, it's this way," confessed Corona. "I can't say my prayers yet
in this place--not to get any heft on them; and that makes me feel
bad, you know. I start along with 'Our Father, which art in heaven,'
and it's like calling up a person on the 'phone when he's close at
your elbow all the time. Then I say 'God bless St. Hospital,' and
there I'm stuck; it don't seem I want to worry God to oblige beyond
that. So I fetch back and start telling how glad I am to be home--as
if God didn't know--and that bats me up to St. Hospital again.
I got stone-walled that way five times last night. What's the sense
of asking to go to heaven when you don't particularly want to?"

"Child," Brother Copas answered, "keep as honest as that and peg
away. You'll find your prayers straighten themselves out all right."

"Sure? . . . Well, that's a comfort: because, of course, I don't want
to go to hell either. It would never do. . . . But why are you
puckering up your eyes so?"

"I was thinking," said Brother Copas, "that I might start teaching
you Latin. Your father and I were discussing it just now."

"Would he like me to learn it?"

"It's the only way to find out all that St. Hospital means, including
all it has meant for hundreds of years. . . . Bless me, is that the
quarter chiming? Take your father's hand and lead him home, child.
_Venit Hesperus, ite capellae_."

"What does that mean?"

"It's Latin," said Brother Copas. "It's a--a kind of absolution."

CHAPTER X.

THE ANONYMOUS LETTER.

Although the month was June and the eve