Grace burst into tears.

“Thank God!  And I thank you, sir!  Oh, there’s never a storm but what some gleam breaks through it!  And now, sir, I would not have told you it before, lest you should fancy that I changed for the sake of gain—­ though, perhaps, that is pride, as too much else has been.  But you will never hear of me inside either of those chapels again.”

“What has altered your opinion of them, then?”

“It would take long to tell, sir:  but what happened this morning filled the cup.  I begin to think, sir, that their God and mine are not the same.  Though why should I judge them, who worshipped that other God myself till no such long time since; and never knew, poor fool, that the Lord’s name was Love?”

“I have found out that, too, in these last days.  More shame to me than to you that I did not know it before.”

“Well for us both that we do know it now, sir.  For if we believed Him now, sir, to be aught but perfect Love, how could we look round here to-night, and not go mad?”

“Amen!” said Frank.

And how had the pestilence, of all things on earth, revealed to those two noble souls that God is Love?

Let the reader, if he have supplied Campbell’s sermon, answer the question for himself.

They went in, and upstairs to Willis.

Grace bent over the old man, tenderly, but with no sign of sorrow.  Dry-eyed, she kissed the old man’s forehead; arranged his bed-clothes, woman-like, before she knelt down; and then the three received the Sacrament together.

“Don’t turn me out,” whispered Tom.  “It’s no concern of mine, of course; but you are all good creatures, and, somehow, I should like to be with you.”

So Tom stayed; and what thoughts passed through his heart are no concern of ours.

Frank put the cup to the old man’s lips; the lips closed, sipped,—­then opened ... the jaw had fallen.

“Gone,” said Grace quietly.

Frank paused, awe-struck.

“Go on, sir,” said she, in a low voice.  “He hears it all more clearly than he ever did before.”  And by the dead man’s side Frank finished the Communion Service.

Grace rose when it was over, kissed the calm forehead, and went out without a word.

“Tom,” said Frank, in a whisper, “come into the next room with me.”

Tom hardly heard the tone in which the words were spoken, or he would perhaps have answered otherwise than he did.

“My father takes the Communion,” said he, half to himself.  “At least, it is a beautiful old—­”

Howsoever the sentence would have been finished, Tom stopped short—­

“Hey?—­What does that mean?”

“At last?” gasped Frank, gently enough.  “Excuse me!” He was bowed almost double, crushing Thurnall’s arm in the fierce gripe of pain.  “Pish!—­ Hang it!—­Impossible!—­There, you are all right now!”

“For the time.  I can understand many things now.  Curious sensation it is, though.  Can you conceive a sword put in on one side of the waist, just above the hip-bone, and drawn through, handle and all, till it passes out at the opposite point?”