"Ah, Mrs. Percivale!" she cried: "I would _do_ something for His sake now if I might, but I cannot. If I had but resisted the disease in me for the sake of serving him, I might have been able now: but my chance is over; I cannot now; I have too much pain. And death looks such a different thing now! I used to think of it only as a kind of going to sleep, easy though sad--sad, I mean, in the eyes of mourning friends. But, alas! I have no friends, now that my husband is gone. I never dreamed of him going first. He loved me: indeed he did, though you will hardly believe it; but I always took it as a matter of course. I never saw how beautiful and unselfish he was till he was gone. I have been selfish and stupid and dull, and my sins have found me out. A great darkness has fallen upon me; and although weary of life, instead of longing for death, I shrink from it with horror. My cough will not let me sleep: there is nothing but weariness in my body, and despair in my heart. Oh how black and dreary the nights are! I think of the time in your house as of an earthly paradise. But where is the heavenly paradise I used to dream of then?" "Would it content you," I asked, "to be able to dream of it again?" "No, no. I want something very different now. Those fancies look so uninteresting and stupid now! All I want now is to hear God say, 'I forgive you.' And my husband--I must have troubled him sorely. You don't know how good he was, Mrs. Percivale. _He_ made no pretences like silly me. Do you know," she went on, lowering her voice, and speaking with something like horror in its tone, "Do you know, I cannot _bear_ hymns!" As she said it, she looked up in my face half-terrified with the anticipation of the horror she expected to see manifested there. I could not help smiling. The case was not one for argument of any kind: I thought for a moment, then merely repeated the verse,-- "When the law threatens endless death, Upon the awful hill, Straightway, from her consuming breath, My soul goes higher still,-- Goeth to Jesus, wounded, slain, And maketh him her home, Whence she will not go out again, And where Death cannot come." "Ah! that is good," she said: "if only I could get to him! But I cannot get to him. He is so far off! He seems to be--nowhere." I think she was going to say _nobody_, but changed the word. "If you felt for a moment how helpless and wretched I feel, especially in the early morning," she went on; "how there seems nothing to look for, and no help to be had,--you would pity rather than blame me, though I know I deserve blame. I feel as if all the heart and soul and strength and mind, with which we are told to love God, had gone out of me; or, rather, as if I had never had any. I doubt if I ever had. I tried very hard for a long time to get a sight of Jesus, to feel myself in his presence; but it was of no use, and I have quite given it up now." I made her lie on the sofa, and sat down beside her.