o Mother, and at church; and I've been
cross to Ellen, and quarrelled with Harold; and I was so audacious at my
Lady's, they couldn't keep me. I never did want really to be good. Oh!
I know I shall go to the bad place!'

'No, Alfred, not if you so repent, that you can hold to our Blessed
Saviour's promise. There is a fountain open for sin and all
uncleanness.'

'It is very good of Him,' said Alfred, a little more tranquilly, not in
the half-sob in which he had before spoken.

'Most merciful!' said Mr. Cope.

'But does it mean me?' continued Alfred.

'You were baptized, Alfred, you have a right to all His promises of
pardon.' And he repeated the blessed sentences:

'Come unto Me, all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh
you.'

'God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, to the end
that all that believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting
life.'

'But how ought I to believe, Sir?'

'You say you feel what your sins are; think of them all as you lie, each
one as you remember it; say it out in your heart to our Saviour, and pray
God to forgive it for His sake, and then think that it cost some of the
pain He bore on the Cross, some of the drops of His agony in the Garden.
Each sin of ours was indeed of that burden!'

'Oh, that will make them seem so bad!'

'Indeed it does; but how it will make you love Him, and feel thankful to
Him, and anxious not to waste the sufferings borne for your sake, and
glad, perhaps, that you are bearing some small thing yourself. But you
are spent, and I had better not talk more now. Let me read you a few
prayers to help you, and then I will leave you, and come again
to-morrow.'

How differently those Prayers and Psalms sounded to Alfred now that he
had really a heart grieved and wearied with the burthen of sin! The
point was to make his not a frightened heart, but a contrite heart.

CHAPTER VII--HAROLD TAKES A WRONG TURN

Mrs. King was very anxious about Alfred for many hours after this visit
from the Curate, for he was continually crying, not violently, but the
tears flowing quietly from his eyes as he lay, thinking. Sometimes it
was the badness of the faults as he saw them now, looking so very
different from what they did when they were committed in the carelessness
of fun and high spirits, or viewed afterwards in the hardening light of
self-justification. Now they did look so wantonly hard and rude--unkind
to his s