But Julia looked up at the depths between the stars, and felt how great God must be, and her rebellion against Him seemed a war at fearful odds.  And then the sense of God’s omnipresence, of His being there alone with her, so startled her and awakened such a feeling of her fearful loneliness, orphanage, antagonism to God, that she could bear it no longer, and at two o’clock she went down again; but Mrs. Brown looked over at Mrs. Orcutt in a way that said:  “Told you so!  Guilty conscience!  Can’t sleep!” And so Julia thought God, even as she conceived Him, better company than men, or rather than women, for—­well, I won’t make the ungallant remark; each sex has its besetting faults.

Julia took back with her a candle, thinking that this awful God would not seem so close if she had a light.  There lay on her bureau a Testament, one of those old editions of the American Bible Society, printed on indifferent paper, and bound in a red muslin that was given to fading, the like whereof in book-making has never been seen since.  She felt angry with God, who, she was sure, was persecuting her, as Cynthy Ann had said, out of jealousy of her love for August, and she was determined that she would not look into that red-cloth Testament, which seemed to her full of condemnation.  But there was a fascination about it she could not resist.  The discordant hysterical laughter of her mother, which reached her ears from below, harrowed her sorely, and her grief and despair at her own situation were so great that she was at last fain to read the only book in the room in order that she might occupy her mind.  There is a strange superstition among certain pietists which loads them to pray for a text to guide them, and then take any chance passage as a divine direction.  I do not mean to say that Julia had any supernatural leading in her reading.  The New Testament is so full of comfort that one could hardly manage to miss it.  She read the seventh chapter of Luke:  how the Lord healed the centurion’s servant that was “dear unto him,” and noted that He did not rebuke the man for loving his slave; how the Lord took pity on that poor widow who wept at the bier of her only son, and brought him back to life again, and “restored him to his mother.”  This did not seem to be just the Christ that Cynthy Ann thought of as the foe of every human affection.  She read more that she did not understand so well, and then at the end of the chapter she read about the woman that was a sinner, that washed His feet with grateful tears and wiped them with her hair.  And she would have taken the woman’s guilt to have had the woman’s opportunity and her benediction.