“Miss Theodora, I wish to say a few words to you seriously, about your health. I should like to see you better--very much better than now--before I go away.” “Possibly you may.” “In any case, you will have to take great care--to be taken great care of--for months to come. Your health is very delicate. Are you aware of that?” “I suppose so.” “You must listen--” The tone roused me. “If you please, you _must_ listen, to what I am saying. It is useless telling any one else, but I tell _you_, that if you do not take care of yourself you will die.” I looked up. No one but he would have said such a thing to me--if he said it, it must be true. “Do you know that it is wrong to die--to let yourself carelessly slip out of God's world, in which He put you to do good work there?” “I have no work to do.” “None of us can say that. You ought not--you shall not. I will not allow it.” His words struck me. There was truth in them--the truth, the faith of my first youth though both had faded in after years--till I knew him. And this was why I clung to this friend of mine, because amidst all the shams and falsenesses around me, and even in myself--in him I ever found, clearly acknowledged, and bravely outspoken--the _truth_. Why should he not help me now? Humbly I asked him, “if he were angry with me?” “Not angry, but grieved; you little know how deeply.” Was it for my dying, or my wickedly wishing to die? I knew not; but that he was strongly affected, more even than he liked me to see, I did see, and it lifted the stone from my heart. “I know I have been very wicked. If any one would thoroughly scold me--if I could only tell anybody--” “Why cannot you tell me?” So I told him, as far as I could, all the dark thoughts that had been troubling me this day; I laid upon him all my burthens; I confessed to him all my sins; and when I ended, not without agitation, for I had never spoken so plainly of myself to any creature before, Doctor Urquhart talked to me long and gently upon the things wherein he considered me wrong in myself and in my home; and of other things where he thought I was only “foolish,” or “mistaken.” Then he spoke of the manifold duties I had in life; of the glory and beauty of living; of the peace attainable, even in this world, by a life which, if ever so sad and difficult, has done the best it could with the materials granted to it--has walked, so far as it could see, in its appointed course, and left the rewarding and the brightening of it solely in the hands of Him who gave it, who never gives anything in vain.