take care of
you. I was once almost as ill as you are, yet I got well. Cheer up,
and let us nurse you back to health.'

"She shook her head. 'No, that's now impossible. You come and cheer
poor mother and father, Miss Alden. I am more than cheerful, I am
happy.'

"I made her call me Madge, and said: 'Tell me then in a few words how
you can be happy. My heart has just been aching for you ever since I
came.'

"Perhaps she saw tears in my eyes, for she said, 'Sit down by me.'
Then she took my hand, leaned her cheek upon it, and looked at me with
such a lovely sympathy in her beautiful dark eyes!

"'Yes,' she said, 'I see you are young and strong, and you probably
have wealth and many friends; still I think I am better off than you
are. I am almost home, and you may have long, weary journeying before
you yet. You ask me why I am happy. I'll just give you the negative
reasons: think how much they mean to me--"And there shall be no more
death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more
pain." All these may be taken from my life any hour. Think of what
will be added to it. You believe all this, Madge?'

"'Yes.'

"'Then you must know why I am happy, and why I may be better off than
you are. It will be very hard for father and mother--there will be
more pain for them here in consequence--but soon it will all end
forever; in a little while we shall be together again. So you know
nearly all about poor little me,' she said, with another of her
smiles, which were the sweetest, yet most unearthly things I ever saw.
'And now tell me about yourself. I'm not able to talk much more for
the present. I'd like to know something about the friend who helped
me through the last few steps of my journey. I can think about you in
heaven, you know,' she said, with the sweetest little laugh. 'Don't
look so sad, Madge. They'll tell you I'm gone soon. "Gone where?" ask
yourself, and never grieve a moment.'

"Oh, Graydon, she made it all seem so real, talking there alone in the
night! And it is just as she says or it isn't anything. When you
said, 'Such a God,' you had in mind a theological phantom, and I don't
wonder you felt as you did; but this girl believes in a God who 'so
loved the world'--who so loved her--and I do also. Her pain, her
thwarted young life, I don't understand any more than I do other
phases of evil, but I can give my allegiance to One who came to take
away the evil of the world. That's about all the reli