‘Ah, child, I’m afraid there’s no Gospel will do that here below.’

’Well, I can do something to comfort Mrs. Crewe, at least; so give me a kiss, and good-bye till church-time.’

The mother leaned back in her chair when Janet was gone, and sank into a painful reverie.  When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering:  the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the water drops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.  Janet looked glad and tender now—­but what scene of misery was coming next?  She was too like the cistus flowers in the little garden before the window, that, with the shades of evening, might lie with the delicate white and glossy dark of their petals trampled in the roadside dust.  When the sun had sunk, and the twilight was deepening, Janet might be sitting there, heated, maddened, sobbing out her griefs with selfish passion, and wildly wishing herself dead.

Mrs. Raynor had been reading about the lost sheep, and the joy there is in heaven over the sinner that repenteth.  Surely the eternal love she believed in through all the sadness of her lot, would not leave her child to wander farther and farther into the wilderness till here was no turning—­the child so lovely, so pitiful to others, so good, till she was goaded into sin by woman’s bitterest sorrows!  Mrs. Raynor had her faith and her spiritual comforts, though she was not in the least evangelical and knew nothing of doctrinal zeal.  I fear most of Mr. Tryan’s hearers would have considered her destitute of saving knowledge, and I am quite sure she had no well-defined views on justification.  Nevertheless, she read her Bible a great deal, and thought she found divine lessons there—­how to bear the cross meekly, and be merciful.  Let us hope that there is a saving ignorance, and that Mrs. Raynor was justified without knowing exactly how.

She tried to have hope and trust, though it was hard to believe that the future would be anything else than the harvest of the seed that was being sown before her eyes.  But always there is seed being sown silently and unseen, and everywhere there come sweet flowers without our foresight or labour.  We reap what we sow, but Nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no planting of ours.

Chapter 6