“Wilmot,” said the rector, “was one who stormed the heart. She went up against it, with flags flying and martial music, and broke in at the point of the bayonet. Kate’s nature is different. She will storm no heart. She sits on the doorstep as a beggar, and does not even knock and solicit admission. Throw open your door, extend your hand, and the timid child will falter in, frightened, yet elate with hope.” “I don’t know,” said Zerah meditatively. “You’ll excuse my saying it, but when a child is heartless”-- “Heartless?--who is heartless?” “Kate, to be sure.” “Heartless?” repeated the rector. “You are in grievous error. No child is heartless. None of God’s creatures are void of love. God is love Himself, and we are all made in the image of the Creator. In all of us is the divine attribute of love. We were made to love and to be loved. It is a necessity of our nature. This poor little spirit--with how much love has it been suckled? With how much has its nakedness been clothed? The cream of your heart’s affection was given to your own daughter, and only the whey--thin and somewhat acidulated--offered to the niece. Turn over a new leaf, Mrs. Pepperill. Treat this child in a manner different from that in which she has been treated. I allow frankly that you have not been unkind, unjust, ungracious. But such a soul as this cannot flower in an atmosphere of negatives. You know something about the principle on which the atmospheric railway acts, do you not, Mrs. Pepperill? There is a pump which exhausts the air. Now put a plant, an animal, into a vessel from which the vital air has been withdrawn, and plant or animal will die at once. It has been given nothing deleterious, nothing poisonous has been administered. It dies simply because it has been deprived of that atmosphere in which God ordained that it should live and flourish. My good friend,” said the rector, and his voice shook with mingled tenderness of feeling and humour, “if I were to take you up and set you under the exhausting apparatus, and work at the pump, you would gasp--gasp and die.” The woman turned cold and blank at the suggestion. “If I did that,” continued the parson, “the coroner who sat on you would pronounce that you had been murdered by me. I should be sent to the assizes, and should infallibly be hung. Very well: there are other kinds of murder than killing the body. There is the killing of the noble, divine nature in man, and that not by acts of violence only, but by denial of what is essential to its existence. Remember this, Mrs. Pepperill: what the atmosphere is to the lungs, that love is to the heart. God created the lungs to be inflated with air, and the heart to be filled with Love.” CHAPTER IX CONVALESCENCE The voice of Pasco was heard shouting up the stairs to his wife. Mrs. Pepperill, glad to escape the lecture, went to the door and called down, “Don’t make such a noise, when the girl is ill.”