"Next day this same father was conducting a meditation--on 'the condescension of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.' I was kneeling, half stupefied, when I heard him tell a story of the Curé d'Ars. After the procession of Corpus Christi, which was very long and fatiguing, someone pressed the Curé to take food. 'I want nothing,' he said. 'How could I be tired? I was bearing Him who bears me!' 'My brothers,' said Father Stuart, turning to the altar, 'the Lord who bore the sin of the whole world on the Cross, who opens the arms of His mercy now to each separate sinful soul, is _there_. He beseeches you by me, "Choose, My children, between the world and Me, between sin and Me, between Hell and Me. Your souls are Mine: I bought them with anguish and tears. Why will ye now hold them back from Me--wherefore will ye die?"' "My whole being seemed to be shaken by these words. But I instantly thought of Marie. I said to myself, 'She is alone--perhaps in despair. How can I save myself, wretched tempter and coward that I am, and leave her in remorse and grief?' And then it seemed to me as though a Voice came from the altar itself, so sweet and penetrating that it overpowered the voice of the preacher and the movements of my companions. I heard nothing in the chapel but It alone. 'She is saved!' It said--and again and again, as though in joy, 'She is saved--saved!' "That night I crept to the foot of the crucifix in my little cell. '_Elegi, elegi: renuntio!_'--I have chosen: I renounce.' All night long those alternate words seemed to be wrung from me." There was deep silence. Helbeck knelt on the grass beside Laura and took her hands afresh. "Laura, since that night I have been my Lord's. It seemed to me that He had come Himself--come from His cross--to raise two souls from the depths of Hell. Marie went into a convent, and died in peace and blessedness; I came home here, to do my duty if I could--and save my soul. That seems to you a mere selfish bargain with God--an 'egotism'--that you hate. But look at the root of it. Is the world under sin--and has a God died for it? All my nature--my intellect, my heart, my will, answer 'Yes.' But if a God died, and must die--cruelly, hideously, at the hands of His creatures--to satisfy eternal justice, what must that sin be that demands the Crucifixion? Of what revolt, what ruin is not the body capable? I knew--for I had gone down into the depths. Is any chastisement too heavy, any restraint too harsh, if it keep us from the sin for which our Lord must die? And if He died, are we not His from the first moment of our birth--His first of all? Is it a selfish bargain to yield Him what He purchased at such a cost, to take care that our just debt to Him is paid--so far as our miserable humanity can pay it. All these mortifications, and penances, and self-denials that you hate so, that make the saints so odious in your eyes, spring from two great facts--Sin and the Crucifixion. But, Laura, are they _true_?"