"I don't know much about my heart, Mr. Hemstead, except that it has always been very perverse. But I now wish I had a better one. You have disturbed the equanimity with which I could do wrong most wofully. I even feel a little guilty for leaving them all this morning, with no explanations." "It was hardly right, now I think of it," said Hemstead, reflectively. "Have you just thought of it? How preoccupied you have been! What have you been thinking about? Yes, it was wrong; but as it is the first wicked thing I have caught you in I am quite comforted. I have been hoping all along that you would do something just a little bit encouragingly wicked." "How little you understand me! My wickedness and consequent twinges of conscience have been my chief sources of trouble thus far." "O, well, your conscience is like Auntie Jane. A speck of dust gives her the fidgets where other people would not see any dust at all. If your conscience had to deal with my sins there would not be ashes and hair-cloth enough for you." "What good can ashes, hair-cloth, or any kind of self-punishment, or even self-condemnation, do us?" "Well, we ought to be sorry, at least." "Certainly, but there must be more than that. Many a wrong-doer has been sincerely sorry, but has been punished all the same. I cannot tell you, Miss Marsden, how much good you did me on Sunday afternoon. My mind had been dwelling on the attributes of God,--upon doctrines as if they were things by themselves and complete in themselves. I almost fear that I should have become, as I fear some are, the disciple of a religious system, instead of a simple and loyal follower of Christ. But you fixed my eyes on a living personality, who has the right to say, 'I forgive you,' and I am forgiven; who has the right to say, 'I will save you,' and I am saved. If He is the Divine Son of God, as He claims to be, has He not the right?" "Yes. He must be able to do just what is pleasing to Him," said Lottie. "Then look upon Him as you saw Him at the grave of Lazarus,--the very embodiment of sympathy. Suppose that in sincere regret for all the wrong you have ever done, and with the honest wish to be better, you go to such a being and cry, 'Forgive.' Can you doubt His natural, inevitable course towards you? If pardoning love and mercy should encircle you at once, would it not be in perfect keeping with His tears of sympathy?" "And is that all I have to do to get rid of the old, dark record against me? O, how black it looked last Saturday!" "That is all. What more can you do? Who was it that said, 'Be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee'?"