. She
could hear Kate's needy and wounded. In imagination she could hear
his proud, noble mother's; his younger brother's. Against the
sound of his responses she closed all hearing; and there low on her
knees, in the ear of Heaven itself, she recorded against him her
unforgiveness and her dismissal forever.

An organ melody followed, thrillingly sweet; and borne outward on
it the beseeching of the All-Merciful:

"'Art thou weary, art thou languid,
Art thou sore distressed?
Come to me!' saith one; 'and, coming,
Be at rest!'"

It was this hymn that brought her in a passion to her feet.

With whatsoever other feelings she had sought the church, it was at
least with the hope that it had a message for her. She had indeed
listened to a personal message, but it was a message delivered to
the wrong person; for at every stage of the worship she, the
innocent, had been forgotten and slighted; Rowan, the guilty, had
been considered and comforted. David had his like in mind and
besought pardon for him; the prophet of old knew of a case like his
and blessed him; the apostle centuries afterward looked on and did
not condemn; Christ himself had in a way told the multitude the
same story that Rowan had told her,--counselling forgiveness. The
very hymns of the church were on Rowan's side--every one gone in
search of the wanderer. For on this day Religion, universal mother
of needy souls and a minister of all comforts, was in the mood to
deal only with youth and human frailty.

She rebelled. It was like commanding her to dishonor a woman's
strongest and purest instincts. It called upon her to sympathize
with the evil that had blighted her life. And Rowan himself!--in
her anger and suffering she could think of him in no other way than
as enjoying this immortal chorus of anxiety on his account; as
hearing it all with complacency and self-approval. It had to her
distorted imagination the effect of offering a reward to him for
having sinned; he would have received no such attention had he
remained innocent.

With one act of complete revulsion she spurned it all: the moral
casuistry that beguiled him, the church that cloaked him; spurned
psalm and prophet and apostle, Christ and parable and song.

"Grandmother," she whispered, "I shall not wait for the sermon."

A moment later she issued from the church doors and took her way
slowly homeward through the deserted streets, under the lonely blue
of the unanswe