Asleep in Jesus! peaceful rest, Whose waking is supremely blest. No fear nor foe shall dim the hour That manifests the Savior's power. Asleep in Jesus! Oh, for me May such a blissful refuge be! Securely shall my ashes lie And wait the summons from the sky. The sweet voice of the singer died away, and the stillness was broken only by low sobbing. Then the minister arose. Gilbert Allison had seen enough. The plain, dark coffin just before the altar railing told him that another human soul had left its earthly body and had gone beyond. He was not interested in this. His mind dwelt on the singer. She was rather small, a well-formed and graceful appearing young woman of perhaps twenty-two or twenty-four. She wore a plain dark dress, and a round hat rested on the masses of red-brown hair that framed her face and crowned her shapely head. Here and there in the mass a carved silver hair-pin showed itself, and Gilbert Allison found himself studying the effect as he walked down the street; found himself puzzled as to why he had stopped and noticed her hair or her. Evidently she had made an impression on him. He tried, in a way, to analyze this, and finally gave it up, yet found himself continually recalling the face in its frame of red-brown hair. He had known many charming women in his three and thirty years of life, but he had never felt before the indescribable charm that had suddenly, like the fragrance of a hidden violet, come to him for the unknown singer in the dingy chapel. Gilbert Allison had guarded well his heart's affections, but there comes a time in the lives of most men when the heart refuses to be subject to the will and obstinately goes whither it pleases. This man's heart was about to assert its rights. The daughter of a Republican was to have a lover, for it was Miss Thorn who sang. That Miss Thorn should sing had been the wish of the now lifeless sleeper, and Jean had done her best. All that was mortal of Maggie Crowley rested in the plain, dark coffin. A life fraught with sorrow and tears and an innocent shame was ended; a body racked with hunger and pain and cold was at rest. From the time of her awful hurt, now a year ago, Maggie had been an invalid. The children had gone out to work, and the frail mother had tried to cheer them as she toiled in the valley of despair. A new sorrow had come into the wretched home: Cora, yet a child in years, because she had a fair face and a drunkard for a father, had been robbed of her one priceless possession--her unspotted character--by a man whose name was familiar in high circles, and whose hand was courted by more than one mother for some cherished daughter. From the time that her sister had bartered away her purity, in the bitter, thankless battle that she fought for bread, Maggie had steadily grown weaker, and when the mother knew the time was near at hand for her to go she sent for Miss Thorn.