filled the grounds of Isabel's home with early
warmth. Quickened by the heat, summoned by the blue, drenched with
showers and dews, all things which have been made repositories of
the great presence of Life were engaged in realizing the utmost
that it meant to them.

It was in the midst of this splendor of light and air, fragrance,
colors, shapes, movements, melodies and joys that Isabel, the
loftiest receptacle of life among them all, soon sat in a secluded
spot, motionless and listless with her unstanched and desperate
wound. Everything seemed happy but herself; the very brilliancy of
the day only deepened the shadow under which she brooded. As she
had slipped away from the house, she would soon have escaped from
the garden had there been any further retreat.

It was not necessary long to wait for one. Borne across the brown
roofs and red chimneys of the town and exploding in the crystal air
above her head like balls of mellow music, came the sounds of the
first church bells, the bells of Christ Church.

They had never conveyed other meaning to her than that proclaimed
by the town clock: they sounded the hour. She had been too
untroubled during her young life to understand their aged argument
and invitation.

Held In the arms of her father, when a babe, she had been duly
christened. His death had occurred soon afterwards, then her
mother's. Under the nurture of a grandmother to whom religion was
a convenience and social form, she had received the strictest
ceremonial but in no wise any spiritual training. The first
conscious awakening of this beautiful unearthly sense had not taken
place until the night of her confirmation--a wet April evening when
the early green of the earth was bowed to the ground, and the
lilies-of-the-valley in the yard had chilled her fingers as she had
plucked them (chosen flower of her consecration); she and they but
rising alike into their higher lives out of the same mysterious
Mother.

That night she had knelt among the others at the chancel and the
bishop who had been a friend of her father's, having approached her
in the long line of young and old, had laid his hands the more
softly for his memories upon her brow with the impersonal prayer:

"_Defend, O Lord, this thy child with thy heavenly grace, that she
may continue thine forever, and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit
more and more, until she come unto thy Everlasting Kingdom_."

For days afterwards a steady radiance