.

This visit was a distinct disappointment on the whole. Sophia had hoped
more from it, and coming after weeks that had been trying, it had power
to depress. It was late afternoon now, and the day was the last in the
year. Sophia, going upstairs to get rid of the noise of the children,
was arrested by the glow of the sunset, and, weary as she was, stood
long by the diamond window that was set in the wooden wall of her room.
It was cold. She wrapped a cloak about her. She did not at first look
observantly at the glow and beauty outside. Her eyes wandered over the
scene, the bright colour upon it rousing just enough interest to keep
her standing there: her thoughts were within.

Sophia Rexford had set herself, like many a saint of olden and modern
times, to crush within her all selfishness; and the result had been the
result of all such effort when it is staunch and honest--to show that
that against which she was warring was no mere mood or bad habit, to be
overcome by directing the life on a nobler plan, but a living thing,
with a vitality so strong that it seemed as if God Himself must have
given it life. She stood now baffled, as she had often been before, by
her invincible enemy. Where was the selfless temper of mind that was her
ideal? Certainly not within her. She was too candid to suppose for a
moment that the impatient scorn she felt for those with whom she had
been talking approached in any way to that humility and love that are
required of the Christian. She felt overwhelmed by surging waves of evil
within. It was at the source the fountain ought to be sweet, and there
ambition and desire for pleasure rose still triumphant; and the current
of her will, set against them, seemed only to produce, not their
abatement, but a whirlpool of discontent, which sucked into itself all
natural pleasures, and cast out around its edge those dislikes and
disdains which were becoming habitual in her intercourse with others. It
was all wrong--she knew it. She leaned her head against the cold pane,
and her eyes grew wet with tears.

There is no sorrow on earth so real as this; no other for which such
bitter tears have been shed; no other which has so moved the heart of
God with sympathy. Yet there came to Sophia just then a strange thought
that her tears were unnecessary, that the salvation of the world was
something better than this conflict, that the angels were looking upon
her discouragement in pained surprise.

She had n