the metaphysics of your good Doctor, you can’t tell how they tire me.  I’m not the sort of person that they can touch.  I must have real things,—­real people; abstractions are nothing to me.  Then I think that he systematically contradicts on one Sunday what he preaches on another.  One Sunday he tells us that God is the immediate efficient Author of every act of will; the next he tells us that we are entire free agents.  I see no sense in it, and can’t take the trouble to put it together.  But then he and you have something in you that I call religion,—­something that makes you good.  When I see a man working away on an entirely honest, unworldly, disinterested pattern, as he does, and when I see you, Mary, as I said before, I should like at least to be as you are, whether I could believe as you do or not.

“How could you so care for me, and waste on one so unworthy of you such love?  Oh, Mary, some better man must win you; I never shall and never can;—­but then you must not quite forget me; you must be my friend, my saint.  If, through your prayers, your Bible, your friendship, you can bring me to your state, I am willing to be brought there,—­nay, desirous.  God has put the key of my soul into your hands.

“So, dear Mary, good-bye!  Pray still for your naughty, loving

“COUSIN JAMES.”

Mary read this letter, and re-read it, with more pain than pleasure.  To feel the immortality of a beloved soul hanging upon us, to feel that its only communications with Heaven must be through us, is the most solemn and touching thought that can pervade a mind.  It was without one particle of gratified vanity, with even a throb of pain, that she read such exalted praises of herself from one blind to the glories of a far higher loveliness.

Yet was she at that moment, unknown to herself, one of the great company scattered through earth who are priests unto God,—­ministering between the Divine One, who has unveiled himself unto them, and those who as yet stand in the outer courts of the great sanctuary of truth and holiness.  Many a heart, wrung, pierced, bleeding with the sins and sorrows of earth, longing to depart, stands in this mournful and beautiful ministry, but stands unconscious of the glory of the work in which it waits and suffers.  God’s kings and priests are crowned with thorns, walking the earth with bleeding feet, and comprehending not the work they are performing.

Mary took from a drawer a small pocket-book, from which dropped a lock of black hair,—­a glossy curl, which seemed to have a sort of wicked, wilful life in every shining ring, just as she had often seen it shake naughtily on the owner’s head.  She felt a strange tenderness towards the little wilful thing, and, as she leaned over it, made in her heart a thousand fond apologies for every fault and error.

She was standing thus when Mrs. Scudder entered the room to see if her daughter had yet retired.