It seems to be difficult for some of us to distinguish between looseness of views, and charitable judgments. To be sorry for people’s sins and follies and to refuse harsh criticism is right; to accept them as a matter of course is wrong. Love and sorrow are twins, and knowledge is their nurse. The pathway of the soul is not a steady ascent, but hilly and broken. We must sometimes go lower, in order to get higher. That which is to-day, and will be to-morrow, must have been yesterday. I know that I live, I believe that I shall live again, and have lived before. Earth life is the middle rung of a long ladder which we climb in the dark. Though we cannot see the steps below, or above, they exist all the same. The materialist denying spirit is like the burr of the chestnut denying the meat within. The inevitable is always right. Prayer is a skeleton key that opens unexpected doors. We may not find the things we came to seek, but we find other treasures. The pessimist belongs to God’s misfit counter. Art, when divorced from Religion, always becomes a wanton. To forget benefits we have received is a crime. To remember benefits we have bestowed is a greater one. To some men a woman is a valuable book, carefully studied and choicely guarded behind glass doors. To others, she is a daily paper, idly scanned and tossed aside. CHAPTER XIX WHILE Joy battled with her sorrow during the days following Preston Cheney’s burial, she woke to the consciousness that her history was known in Beryngford. The indescribable change in the manner of her acquaintances, the curiosity in the eyes of some, the insolence or familiarity of others, all told her that her fears were realised; and then there came a letter from the church authorities requesting her to resign her position as organist. This letter came to the young girl on one of those dreary autumn nights when all the desolation of the dying summer, and none of the exhilaration of the approaching winter, is in the air. She had been labouring all day under a cloud of depression which hovered over her heart and brain and threatened to wholly envelop her; and the letter from the church committee cut her heart like a poniard stroke. Sometimes we are able to bear a series of great disasters with courage and equanimity, while we utterly collapse under some slight misfortune. Joy had been a heroine in her great sorrows, but now in the undeserved loss of her position as church organist, she felt herself unable longer to cope with Fate. “There’s no place for me anywhere,” she said to herself. Had she known the truth, that the Baroness had represented her to the committee as a fallen woman of the metropolis, who had left the city for the city’s good, the letter would not have seemed to her so cruelly unjust and unjustifiable.