'It was certainly a direct Providence,' Aunt Emmeline used to say in later years to really sympathetic friends, 'that I thought of going up to the church when I did. Otherwise nothing could have saved dear Ernest. He was terrified, quite crazy with fright, poor child, and he rushed out at me from behind our pew shouting, "Come away, come away, auntie, come away!" and dragged me out. Mrs. Meadows providentially followed, to see what it was all about, and the next thing was the catastrophe.' 'The church was struck by a thunder-bolt was it not?' the sympathetic friend asks. 'It was indeed--a deafening crash, my dear--and then the church slowly crumbled before our eyes. The south wall broke like a slice of cake when you break it across--and the noise and the dust! Mrs. Meadows never had her hearing again, poor thing, and her mind was a little affected too. I became unconscious, and Ernest--well, it was altogether too much for the child. He lay between life and death for weeks. Shock to the system, the physician said. He had been rather run down before. We had to get a little cousin to come and live with us afterwards. The physicians said that he required young society.' 'It must indeed have been a shock,' says the sympathetic friend, who knows there is more to come. 'His intellect was quite changed, my dear,' Aunt Emmeline resumes; 'on regaining consciousness he demanded the marble child! Cried and raved, my dear, always about the marble child. It appeared he had had fancies about one of the little angels that supported the old font, not the present font, my dear. We presented that as a token of gratitude to Providence for our escape. Of course we checked his fancifulness as well as we could, but it lasted quite a long time.' 'What became of the little marble angel?' the friend inquires as in friendship bound. 'Crushed to powder, dear, in the awful wreck of the church. Not a trace of it could be found. And poor Mrs. Meadows! So dreadful those delusions.' 'What form did her delusions take?' the friend, anxious to be done with the old story, hastily asks. 'Well, she always declared that _two_ children ran out to warn me and that one of them was very unusual looking. "It wasn't no flesh and blood, ma'am," she used to say in her ungrammatical way; "it was a little angel a-taking care of Master Ernest. It 'ad 'old of 'is 'and. And I say it was 'is garden angel, and its face was as bright as a lily in the sun."' The friend glances at the India cabinet, and Aunt Emmeline rises and unlocks it. 'Ernest must have been behaving in a very naughty and destructive way in the church--but the physician said he was not quite himself probably, for when they got him home and undressed him they found this in his hand.' Then the sympathizing friend polishes her glasses and looks, not for the first time, at the relic from the drawer of the India cabinet. It is a white marble finger.