“Millie, then, as Belle said?”

“Yes.”

“Millie, do you believe in a heaven?”

“Yes.”

“What is it like?”

“I don’t know very well.  It’s described to us under every grand and beautiful image the world affords.  I think we’ll find it what we best need to make us happy.”

“Oh, then it would be rest for mother and me,” the girl sighed wearily.

“It’s surely rest,” Mildred replied quickly, “for I remember a place in the Bible where it says, ’There remaineth a rest for the people of God.’”

“That’s it,” said Clara with some bitterness; “it’s always the people of God.  What remains for such as we, who have always been so busy fighting the wolf that we’ve thought little of God or church?”

“You’ve been no poorer, Clara, than Christ was all His life, and were He on earth now as He was once, I’d bring Him here to your room.  He’d come, too, for He lived among just such people as we are, and never once refused to help them in their troubles or their sins.”

“Once—­once,” cried Clara, with a gush of tears.  “Where is He now?”

“Here with us.  I know it, for we need Him.  Our need is our strongest claim—­one that He never refused.  I have entreated Him in your behalf and your mother’s, and do you ask Him also to put heaven at the end of this dark and often thorny path which most of us must tread in this world.”

“Oh, Millie, Millie, I’m ignorant as a heathen.  I did have a Bible, but I sold even that to buy wine to save mother’s life.  I might better have been thinking of saving her soul.  She’s too sick to be talked to now, but surely she ought to find at least a heaven of rest.  You could never understand the life she’s led.  She hasn’t lived—­she’s just been dragged through the world.  She was born in a tenement-house.  The little play she ever had was on sidewalks and in the gutters; she’s scarcely ever seen the country.  Almost before she knew how to play she began to work.  When she was only seventeen a coarse, bad man married her.  How it ever came about I never could understand.  I don’t believe he knew anything more of love than a pig; for he lived like one and died like one, only he didn’t die soon enough.  It seems horrible that I should speak in this way of my father, and yet why should I not, when he was a horror to me ever since I can remember?  Instead of taking care of mother, she had to take care of him.  He’d take the pittance she had wrung from the washtub for drink, and then come back to repay her for it with blows and curses.  I guess we must have lived in fifty tenements, for we were always behind with the rent and so had to move here and there, wherever we could get a place to put our heads in.  Queer places some of them were, I can tell you—­mere rat-holes.  They served one purpose, though—­they finished off the children.  To all mother’s miseries and endless work was added the anguish of child-bearing.