What post? What trust? Ah, conscience was ready enough with the answer. Was it not just ten years since, as a girl of sixteen, prematurely old and thoughtful, she had sat beside her father’s deathbed, while her delicate, hysterical mother in a state of utter collapse was kept away from him by the doctors? She could see the drawn face, the restless, melancholy eyes. ‘Catherine, my darling, you are the strong one. They will look to you. Support them.’ And she could see in imagination her own young face pressed against the pillows. ‘Yes, father, always--always!’ ‘Catherine, life is harder, the narrow way narrower than ever. I die’--and memory caught still the piteous, long-drawn breath by which the voice was broken--‘in much--much perplexity about many things. You have a clear soul, an iron will. Strengthen the others. Bring them safe to the Day of account.’ ‘Yes, father, with God’s help. Oh, with God’s help!’ That long-past dialogue is clear and sharp to her now, as though it were spoken afresh in her ears. And how has she kept her pledge? She looks back humbly on her life of incessant devotion, on the tie of long dependence which has bound to her her weak and widowed mother, on her relations to her sisters, the efforts she has made to train them in the spirit of her father’s life and beliefs. Have those efforts reached their term? Can it be said in any sense that her work is done, her promise kept? Oh, no--no--she cries to herself, with vehemence. Her mother depends on her every day and hour for protection, comfort, enjoyment. The girls are at the opening of life--Agnes twenty, Rose eighteen, with all experience to come. And Rose--Ah! at the thought of Rose Catherine’s heart sinks deeper and deeper--she feels a culprit before her father’s memory. What is it has gone so desperately wrong with her training of the child? Surely she has given love enough, anxious thought enough, and here is Rose only fighting to be free from the yoke of her father’s wishes, from the galling pressure of the family tradition! No. Her task has just now reached its most difficult, its most critical, moment. How can she leave it? Impossible. What claim can she put against these supreme claims of her promise, her mother’s and sisters’ need? _His_ claim? Oh, no--no! She admits with soreness and humiliation unspeakable that she has done him wrong. If he loves her she has opened the way thereto; she confesses in her scrupulous honesty that when the inevitable withdrawal comes she will have given him cause to think of her hardly, slightingly. She flinches painfully under the thought. But it does not alter the matter. This girl, brought up in the austerest school of Christian self-government, knows nothing of the divine rights of passion. Half modern literature is based upon them, Catherine Leyburn knew of no supreme right but the right of God to the obedience of man.