to write.  She capped her climax—­even as I have heard a revivalist pray for a scoffer that had vexed his righteous soul—­by asking God to convert her daughter, or if she could not be converted to take her away, that she might not heap up wrath against the day of wrath.  For that sort of religious excitement which does not quiet the evil passions, seems to inflame them, and Mrs. Anderson was not in any right sense sane.  And the prayer was addressed more to the frightened Julia than to God.  She would have been terribly afflicted had her petition been granted.

Julia would have run away from the admonition which followed the prayer, had it not been that Mrs. Anderson adroitly put it under cover of a religious exhortation.  She besought Julia to repent, and then, affecting to show her her sinfulness, she proceeded to abuse her.

Had Julia no temper?  Yes, she had doubtless a spice of her mother’s anger without her meanness.  She would have resisted, but that from childhood she had felt paralyzed by the utter uselessness of all resistance.  The bravest of the villagers at the foot of Vesuvius never dreamed of stopping the crater’s mouth.

But, happily, at last Mrs. Anderson’s insane wrath went a little too far.

“You poor lost sinner,” she said, “to think you should go to destruction under my very eyes, disgracing us all, by running over the country at night with bad men!  But there’s mercy even for such as you.”

Julia would not have understood the full meaning of this aspersion of her purity, had she not caught Humphreys’s eye.  His expression, half sneer, half leer, seemed to give her mother’s saying its full interpretation.  She put out her hand.  She turned white, and said:  “Say one word more, and I will go away from you and never come back!  Never!” And then she sat down and cried, and then Mrs. Anderson’s maternal love, her “unloving love,” revived.  To have her daughter leave her, too, would be a sort of defeat.  She hushed, and sat down in her splint-bottomed rocking-chair, which snapped when she rocked, and which seemed to speak for her after she had shut her mouth.  Her face settled into a martyr-like appeal to Heaven in proof of the justice of her cause.  And then she fell back on her forlorn hope.  She wept hysterically, in sincere self-pity, to think that an affectionate mother should have such a daughter!

Julia, finding that her mother had desisted, went to her room.  She did not exactly pray, but she talked to herself as she paced the floor.  It was a monologue, and yet there was a conscious appeal to an invisible Presence, who could not misjudge her, and so she passed from talking to herself to talking to God, and that without any of the formality of prayer.  Her mother had made God seem to be against her.  Now she, like David, protested her innocence to God.  She recited half to herself, and yet also to God—­for is not every appeal to one’s conscience in some sense an appeal to God?—­she recited all the struggles of that night when she went to August at the castle.  People talk of the consolation there is in God’s mercy.  But Julia found comfort in God’s justice.  He could not judge her wrongly.