"Oh, Heaven!" shuddered the listener, "be silent, Lulu. You will drive me mad. I cannot, cannot bear the least reference to my child! Only just now, as I drove up Main street in my little phaeton, taking a silly sort of triumph to myself at the sensation created by my pretty face and cream-white ponies, I met the funeral of a little child on its way to the cemetery--the casket was covered with lilies and roses--and, oh, Lulu, I thought of my own little one, and its probable fate! and, oh, I wished my heart would break! Why, why does not God let me die!" and, shivering with repressed agony, the young wife suffered Lulu to hold her in her close-clasped arms, while she wept and moaned on her breast. And Lulu, wise in her young experience, let the saving tears flow on, until Mrs. Winans lifted her head and said, mournfully; "Oh, Lulu, you should not reproach me for trying to fill up in some way the great blank in my life as best I can! I dare not brood alone over my vacant heart and wretched doom, for I should go mad. I must seek diversion, oblivion!--what would you have me do?" Lulu's brown eyes lifted to the picture that hung over the lounge. "Gracie," she said impressively, "is there no other way to fill up your vacant heart and life than by utter abandonment to the pleasures of the social world?" The listener's eyes followed hers. "'Simply to Thy cross I cling,'" she repeated listlessly. "If you must have a salve for your wounded heart," Lulu went on, as she toyed with the bright curls that lay against her shoulder still, "there is nothing on earth that so fills up vacant heart and life as the cross of Christ the Crucified; Gracie, do you ever pray?" "I am too wretched," she answered, hopelessly. "Too wretched! Oh, Gracie, dear friend, do you forget how in the darkest hours our Lord spent in the Garden of Gethsemane that, _being in an agony, He prayed more earnestly_? It is in hours of the deepest suffering that we should pray most. When we feel that earth offers no consolation, where can we look but to heaven? And the blessing of God _must_ follow such prayers, since Christ himself has set us the example," continued the young mentor, earnestly. "No blessings ever follow my prayers," answered the mourner, with her eyes fixed sadly, through a mist of tears, on the figure that clung "helpless" to the cross, "even when I pray, which I do--sometimes." "You do not pray in the right spirit, then," said her friend, gently but firmly. "You do not expect a blessing to follow your prayers, and we are only healed by faith, not by the simple act of prayer, but by the faith that breathes in it. If you asked a blessing nightly, it would follow prayer, be sure. Remember His promise, 'Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find.'"