There was a difficulty in the way.  Turn where she would, it confronted Marion during these days.  There was a solemn haunting “if” that would not be put down.  What if all these things were true?  She by no means felt so assured as she had once done:  indeed, the foundations for her disbelief seemed to have been shaken from under her during the last week.

Remember, she had never spent a week with Christians before in her life; not, at least, a week during which she was made to realize all the time that they were Christians; that they stood on a different platform from herself.

Now, as she tramped about through the darkening woods, meeting constantly groups of people on their way home from the meeting, hearing from them snatches of what had been said and sung, she suddenly paused, and so vivid was the impression that for long afterward she could not think of it without feeling that a voice must certainly have spoken the words in her ear.  Yet she recognized them as a sentence which had struck her from Dr. Pierce’s sermon in the morning.

“God honors his gospel, even though preached by a bad man; honors it sometimes to the saving of a soul.  But think of a meeting between the two! the sinner saved and the sinner lost, who was the means of the other’s salvation.”  It had thrilled Marion at the time, with her old questioning thrill:  What if such a thing were possible!  Now it came again.

She stood perfectly still, all the blood seeming to recede from and leave her faint with the strange solemnity of the thought!  What if she had this evening been preaching the gospel to Ruth!  What if the words of hers should lead Ruth to think, and to hunt, and to find this light that those who were not blind—­if there were any such—­succeeded in finding!  What if, as a result of this, she should go to heaven! and what if it were true that there was to be a judgment, and they two should meet, and then and there she should realize that it was because of this evening’s talk that Ruth stood in glory on the other side of the great gulf of separation!  What kind of a feeling would that be?

“Oh, if I only knew,” she said aloud, sitting suddenly down on a fallen log, “if I only knew that any of these things were so! or if I could only get to imagining that they were, I would take them up and have the comfort out of them that some of these people seem to get, for I have so little comfort in my life.  It can not be that it is all a farce, such as Ruth’s horrid resolve would lead one to think; that is not the way that Dr. Vincent feels about it; it is not the way that Dr. Pierce preached about it this morning; it is not the way that man Bliss sings about it.  There is more to it than that.  My father had more than that.  If he could only look down to-night and tell me whether it is so, whether he is safe and well and perfectly happy.  Oh, it seems to me if I could only be sure, sure beyond a doubt that God did give an eternal heaven to my father, I could love him forever for doing that, even though there is a hell and I go to it.”