Yet the passing of Nora Costello, like the passing of Pippa in the poem, had left its light, ineffaceable touch on at least one life that night. CHAPTER XIII A SOLDIER "'T was August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green; And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited. "I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 'Ill and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?' 'Bravely!' he said; 'for I of late have been Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the _living bread_.'" Nora Costello was even more moved than Flint by their chance meeting, if meeting it could be called, under the white light of the lamps of Madison Square. On leaving Nepaug, she had resolutely shut out of her mental horizon the acquaintances that she had made in her few days there. She felt instinctively that any further continuance of the associations would be fraught with embarrassing complications, if not actual perils. These people belonged to a world to which she was as dead as though she had taken the black veil in a convent. As the daughter of the manse, in her young girlhood she had come in contact with people of refinement and some wealth; people of keen perceptions if somewhat pronounced limitations; and she realized that in enlisting in the Salvation Army, she had not only shocked their prejudices beyond repair, but had wrenched herself out of their sympathies in a degree which could not have been exceeded by an actual crime on her part. Time had in some measure healed the sensitiveness which had been sorely wounded by the withdrawal and disapproval of these early friends; but she seemed to feel all reflected and renewed in her brief acquaintance with the strangers at Nepaug, especially in her intercourse with Miss Standish. There is a curious resemblance, which lies deeper than outward circumstances, between New England and Scotland. The same outward environment of frugal poverty, the same inward experience of intense religious exaltation, continued from generation to generation, produced in early New England a type closely allied to the Scotch Covenanters, and many resemblances still linger among their descendants, widely as they may be removed from the primitive conditions which formed their ancestors. Miss Standish's manner was marked by all the old Covenanters' directness, and in spite of her prepossession in Nora Costello's favor, showed clearly that she looked upon her as an extremist, if not a fanatic. "What took you into that Salvation Army?" she had asked, as she sat by Nora's bedside in the upper front chamber of the White-House. "A divine call, I hope," Nora had answered. "Couldn't you have done just as much good in some of the churches?" "Very likely, but there's many will be doing that work, and there's no over-crowding among us highway-and-hedgers."