“Give me one of the books, if you please, Cousin Silence,” said Miss Cynthia.  “It is Saturday evening.  Holy time has begun.  Let us prepare our minds for the solemnities of the Sabbath.”

She took the book, one well known to the schools and churches of this nineteenth century.

“Book Second.  Hymn 44.  Long metre.  I guess ‘Putney’ will be as good a tune as any to sing it to.”

The trio began,—­

“With holy fear, and humble song,”

and got through the first verse together pretty well.  Then came the second verse: 

“Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
The land of horror and despair,
Justice has built a dismal hell,
And laid her stores of vengeance there.”

Myrtle’s voice trembled a little in singing this verse, and she hardly kept up her part with proper spirit.

“Sing out, Myrtle,” said Miss Cynthia, and she struck up the third verse: 

“Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
And darts t’ inflict immortal pains,
Dyed in the blood of damned souls.”

This last verse was a duet, and not a trio.  Myrtle closed her lips while it was singing, and when it was done threw down the book with a look of anger and disgust.  The hunted soul was at bay.

“I won’t sing such words,” she said, “and I won’t stay here to hear them sung.  The boys in the streets say just such words as that, and I am not going to sing them.  You can’t scare me into being good with your cruel hymn-book!”

She could not swear:  she was not a boy.  She would not cry:  she felt proud, obdurate, scornful, outraged.  All these images, borrowed from the holy Inquisition, were meant to frighten her—­and had simply irritated her.  The blow of a weapon that glances off, stinging, but not penetrating, only enrages.  It was a moment of fearful danger to her character, to her life itself.

Without heeding the cries of the two women, she sprang up-stairs to her hanging chamber.  She threw open the window and looked down into the stream.  For one moment her head swam with the sudden, overwhelming, almost maddening thought that came over her,—­the impulse to fling herself headlong into those running waters and dare the worst these dreadful women had threatened her with.  Something she often thought afterwards it was an invisible hand held her back during that brief moment, and the paroxysm—­just such a paroxysm as throws many a young girl into the Thames or the Seine—­passed away.  She remained looking, in a misty dream, into the water far below.  Its murmur recalled the whisper of the ocean waves.  And through the depths it seemed as if she saw into that strange, half—­remembered world of palm-trees and white robes and dusky faces, and amidst them, looking upon her with ineffable love and tenderness, until all else faded from her sight, the face of a fair woman,—­was it hers, so long, long dead, or that dear young mother’s who was to her less a recollection than a dream?