They had never conveyed other meaning to her than that proclaimed by the town clock:  they sounded the hour.  She had been too untroubled during her young life to understand their aged argument and invitation.

Held In the arms of her father, when a babe, she had been duly christened.  His death had occurred soon afterwards, then her mother’s.  Under the nurture of a grandmother to whom religion was a convenience and social form, she had received the strictest ceremonial but in no wise any spiritual training.  The first conscious awakening of this beautiful unearthly sense had not taken place until the night of her confirmation—­a wet April evening when the early green of the earth was bowed to the ground, and the lilies-of-the-valley in the yard had chilled her fingers as she had plucked them (chosen flower of her consecration); she and they but rising alike into their higher lives out of the same mysterious Mother.

That night she had knelt among the others at the chancel and the bishop who had been a friend of her father’s, having approached her in the long line of young and old, had laid his hands the more softly for his memories upon her brow with the impersonal prayer: 

“Defend, O Lord, this thy child with thy heavenly grace, that she may continue thine forever, and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit more and more, until she come unto thy Everlasting Kingdom.”

For days afterwards a steady radiance seemed to Isabel to rest upon her wherever she went, shed straight from Eternity.  She had avoided her grandmother, secluded herself from the closest companions, been very thoughtful.

Years had elapsed since.  But no experience of the soul is ever wasted or effaceable; and as the sound of the bells now reached her across the garden, they reawoke the spiritual impulses which had stirred within her at confirmation.  First heard whispering then, the sacred annunciation now more eloquently urged that in her church, the hour of real need being come, she would find refuge, help, more than earthly counsellor.

She returned unobserved to the house and after quick simple preparation, was on her way.

When she slipped shrinkingly into her pew, scarce any one had arrived.  Several women in mourning were there and two or three aged men.  It is the sorrowful and the old who head the human host in its march toward Paradise:  Youth and Happiness loiter far behind and are satisfied with the earth.  Isabel looked around with a poignant realization of the broken company over into which she had so swiftly crossed.

She had never before been in the church when it was empty.  How hushed and solemn it waited in its noonday twilight—­the Divine already there, faithful keeper of the ancient compact; the human not yet arrived.  Here indeed was the refuge she had craved; here the wounded eye of the soul could open unhurt and unafraid; and she sank to her knees with a quick prayer of the heart, scarce of the lips, for Isabel knew nothing about prayer in her own words—­that she might have peace of mind during these guarded hours:  there would be so much time afterwards in which to remember—­so many years in which to remember!