Whatever shame and pain there was about laying bare my soul before another, I gladly embraced it, as one poor means at my command of showing to Him whom I had offended, that my repentance was actual, that I stopped at no humiliation.

It may very well be that these feelings would find no place in larger, grander, more self-reliant natures; that what healed my soul would only wound another.  I am not prepared to think that one remedy is cure for all diseases, but I know what cured mine.  I bless God for “the soothing hand that Love on Conscience laid.”  I mark that hour as the beginning of a fresh and favored life; the dawning of a hope that has not yet lost its power

                                “to tame
     The haughty brow, to curb the unchastened eye,
     And shape to deeds of good each wavering aim.”

CHAPTER XX.

THE HOUR OF DAWN.

     Slowly light came, the thinnest dawn,
       Not sunshine, to my night;
     A new, more spiritual thing,
       An advent of pure light.

     All grief has its limits, all chastenings their pause;
     Thy love and our weakness are sorrow’s two laws.

The winter that followed seemed very long and uneventful.  After Sister Madeline went away, my days settled themselves into the routine in which they continued to revolve for many months.  I was as lonely as formerly, save for the companionship of well-chosen books, and for the direction of another mind, which I felt to be the truest support and guidance.  I was taught to bend to my uncle’s wishes, and to give up constant church-going, and visiting among the poor, which would have been such a resource and occupation to me.  And so my life, outwardly, was very little changed from former years—­years that I had found almost insupportable, without any sorrow; and yet, strange to say, I was not unhappy.

My hours were full of little duties, little rules. (I suppose my heart was in them, or I should have found them irksome.) Above all, I was not permitted to brood over the past:  I was taught to feel that every thought of it indulged, was a sin, and to be accounted for as such:  I could only remember the one for whom I mourned, on my knees, in my prayers.  This checked, as nothing else could have done, the morbid tendency of grief, in a lonely, unoccupied, undisciplined mind.  I was thoroughly obedient, and bent myself with all simplicity to follow the instructions given me.  Sometimes they seemed very irrelevant and useless, but I never rebelled against any, even one that seemed as hard to flesh and blood as this.  And I have, sooner or later, seen the wisdom of them all, as I have worked out the problem of my correction.

Obedient as I was, though, and simple as the routine of my life continued, sometimes there came crises that were beyond my strength.