"Where shall I turn?" she asked herself, as with folded arms she paced the floor with rapid steps, keeping time to the falling rain outside that poured in swift torrents as "though the heart of heaven were breaking in tears o'er the fallen earth." Human love, human ties seemed lost to her, earth offered no refuge from her suffering. Poor, wronged, and tortured young spirit, "breathing in bondage but to bear the ills she never wrought"--where could she turn but to Him who pours the oil of comfort on wounds that in His strange providence may grow to be "blessings in disguise?" She paused in the middle of the floor, lifting her eyes mournfully upward, half-clasping her hands, wavered an instant, then falling on her knees, lifted reverent hands and eyes, while from her lips broke the humble rhymic prayer: "Other refuge have I none, Helpless to Thy cross I cling; Cover my defenseless head With the shadow of Thy wing." Surely, if "He giveth his angels charge concerning us," that pure, heart-wrung petition floated upward on wings seraphic. CHAPTER XIX. A NEW YEAR'S GIFT. "And why, if we must part, Lulu! Why let me love you so? Nay, waste no more your sweet farewells, I _cannot_ let you go-- Not let you go, Lulu! I cannot let you go!" --MRS. OSGOOD. On the following Christmas morning Mrs. Clendenon, Mrs. Winans and Lulu, together with the returned captain, all attended divine service at the Protestant Episcopal Church. It seems strange how many of us become recognized members of the Church of Christ under religious conviction, without ever having any great and realizing sense of the saving power of God, not only in the matter of the world beyond, but in the limitless power of sustaining us among the trials of this. This had been peculiarly the case with our heroine. She had for years been a member of the Episcopal Church, and, as the world goes, a dutiful member. But religion had been to her mind too much in the abstract, too much a thing above and beyond her to be taken into her daily life in the part of a comforter and sustainer. She had gone to the world for consolation in the hour of her trial. It had failed her. To-day as the glorious old "Te Deum" rose and soared grandly through the arches of the temple of worship, filling her soul with sublime pathos, she began to see how He, who had dimly held to her the place of a Saviour in the world beyond, is an ever-present Comforter and sustainer in the fateful Gethsemane of this probationary earth.