To save one such glorious soul, she said to herself, was work enough for one little life.  She was willing to spend it all in endurance, unseen by him, unknown to him, so that at last he should be received into that Paradise which her ardent imagination conceived so vividly.  Surely, there she should meet him, radiant as the angel of her dream; and then she would tell him that it was all for his sake that she had refused to listen to him here.  And these sinful longings to see him once more, these involuntary reachings of her soul after an earthly companionship, she should find strength to overcome in this pilgrimage.  She should go to Rome,—­the very city where the blessed Paul poured out his blood for the Lord Jesus,—­where Peter fed the flock, till his time, too, came to follow his Lord in the way of the cross.  She should even come near to her blessed Redeemer; she should go up, on her knees, those very steps to Pilate’s hall where He stood bleeding, crowned with thorns,—­His blood, perhaps, dropping on the very stones.  Ah, could any mortal love distract her there?  Should she not there find her soul made free of every earthly thrall to love her Lord alone,—­as she had loved Him in the artless and ignorant days of her childhood,—­but better, a thousand times?

“Good morning to you, pretty dove!” said a voice from without the garden-wall; and Agnes, roused from her reverie, saw old Jocunda.

“I came down to help you off,” she said, as she came into the little garden.  “Why, my dear little saint! you are looking white as a sheet, and with those tears!  What’s it all for, baby?”

“Ah, Jocunda! grandmamma is angry with me all the time now.  I wish I could go once more to the Convent and see my dear Mother Theresa.  She is angry, if I but name it; and yet she will not let me do anything here to help her, and so I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, at any rate, don’t cry, pretty one!  Your grandmamma is worked with hard thoughts.  We old folks are twisted and crabbed and full of knots with disappointment and trouble, like the mulberry-trees that they keep for vines to run on.  But I’ll speak to her; I know her ways; she shall let you go; I’ll bring her round.”

“So-ho, sister!” said the old soul, hobbling to the door, and looking in at Elsie, who was sitting flat on the stone floor of her cottage, sorting a quantity of flax that lay around her.  The severe Roman profile was thrown out by the deep shadows of the interior,—­and the piercing black eyes, the silver-white hair, and the strong, compressed lines of the mouth, as she worked, and struggled with the ghosts of her former life, made her look like no unapt personification of one of the Fates reviewing her flax before she commenced the spinning of some new web of destiny.

“Good morning to you, sister!” said Jocunda.  “I heard you were off tomorrow, and I came to see what I could do to help you.”

“There’s nothing to be done for me, but to kill me,” said Elsie.  “I am weary of living.”