For a few moments her lips were compressed in the silent anguish that benumbs the mind and racks the body in every nerve and fibre. She almost collapsed inertly on the steps. Then the loathing of life that had possessed her as she had threaded her way through the narrow, sordid streets returned with all its dread insistence of inconquerable morbid thought. “So long as men are what they are,” she said under her breath, despairingly, “God cannot be good,” and she drew herself up with dry eyes and haggard face, and mechanically crossing herself as she gained her feet, she turned to leave the church without another word. She tottered slowly and half blindly down the aisle and only reached the darkened vestibule with a great effort and several stops on the way. Putting her hand to the heavy, leathern door, she found herself too feeble to move it. She leaned wearily against the wainscot and waited. No one came. Then, moved with the petulance of passionate despair, she prayed in her heart, “Oh, God, let me out of thy House since thou wilt not answer my prayers.” It was now twilight, and she recalled the flaunting horrors and misery of the squalid streets of the quarter, and a feeling of revulsion swept over her. After all, she and her husband had only God in all the world to look to for help and comfort under the burdens of life; for even the knowledge of misery and sorrow does not teach men love and pity. And in the cruel world she only dared to be human with God. She steadied herself against the wall, her eyes dimmed with tears, and her soul filled with a great longing to pour out her repentance, and again ask the boon that haunted her troubled dreams as well as her waking thoughts. She stumbled into one of the nearest pews, and falling upon her knees she repeated mentally, with her busy thoughts otherwhere, one of the prayers of the regular service, and then a great cry arose in her soul, and she wailed the prayer that monopolized her heart and mind day and night, and in or out of church was always being prayed in all her life. “Oh, Lord God, we are utterly alone and bereft in the world, save as Thy presence is near to comfort us. I ask and pray for only one thing--for the life and strength of my poor husband, who is as Thou knowest wasting at death’s door, and in our misery I can do nothing to save him, nothing to alleviate his sufferings. Oh, God, I have given Thee this day, to make my special prayer--and a day is so much to the poor, whose bread must be won somehow every day. Oh, dear Lord, in mercy hear me. There is no pity, no mercy, no compassion among men, for they live only for gold though they bring their prayers to Thee. Only Thou, the living truth and God art left to our hope, and I am here at thy altar to claim the gift of life Thou hast promised in giving life. Abandoned and despised, denied and starved by men, I come to Thee, in our dire extremity, and ask this boon of life of Thy omnipotent arm.”