The little chapel was fairly cool, and through a door very near the altar, open to the garden, came the scent of mignonette on the air. Besides the motionless figures at the altar-rail there was no one else in the chapel. At eight o'clock two small brown figures came in and knelt bowed down in the middle of the sanctuary. The two who had finished their watch rose and knelt by the side of those who relieved guard. Then the four rose together, and the two newcomers took up their station, and the others left them. And the incessant oblation of those lives went on. What a vast moral space lay between their lives and Molly's! What a contrast! Molly had had no home, but they had given up their homes for this. Molly had pined in vain for human love; they had turned away from it. Molly had rebelled against all restraints; they had chosen these bonds. Molly had sinned, against even the world's code, for love of the world; and they had rejected even the best the world could give. Was it unjust, unfair that the boon they asked for in return was given to them? If, on the one hand, Molly had inherited evil tendencies and had fallen on evil circumstances, does it seem strange that she could share in good as well as in evil? It is easy to take scandal at Molly's inherited legacy of evil tendencies. It is easy to take scandal at the facility of her forgiveness. The two stumbling-blocks are in reality the two aspects of one truth, that no human being stands alone and that each gains or suffers with or by his fellows. The sinless women pleaded for sinners in a glorious human imitation of the Divine pleading. And the exuberant vitality poured by the Conqueror of death into the human race, flowing strongly through that tiny chapel, had carried the little, thin, stagnant stream of Molly's soul into the great flood of grace that purifies by sorrow and by love. Molly knelt in one of the back benches with her eyes fixed on the monstrance, in a very agony of sorrow and self-abasement. I would not if I could analyse that penitence. Happily as life goes on we shrink more, not less, from raising even the most reverent gaze on the secret places of the soul. We do not know in what form, if in any form at all, and not rather, in a light without words, the Divine Peace reached her. Was it, "Go in peace, thy sins are forgiven thee?" Or was it perhaps, "This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise?" We cannot tell. Only the lay-sister who saw Molly go out with the little black bag in her hand said afterwards that the lady had seemed happy. THE END. _A Selection from the Catalogue of_ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Complete Catalogues sent on application "_A work of absorbing interest_" THE SOCIALIST BY GUY THORNE Author of "WHEN IT WAS DARK," "A LOST CAUSE," ETC.