as living! There was a pulse and a rush in this! Marion
Kent _was_ living, with all her nature that had yet waked up, at
that bewildering and superficial moment.

But she has got to live deeper. The Lord, who gave her life, will
not let her off so. It will come. It is coming.

We know not the day nor the hour; though we go on as if we knew all
things and were sure.

At this very instant, there is close upon you, Marion Kent, one of
those lightning shafts that run continually quivering to and fro
about the earth, with their net-work of fire, in this storm of life
under which we of to-day are born. All the air is tremulous with
quick, converging nerves; concentrating events, bringing each soul,
as it were, into a possible focus continually, under the forces that
are forging to bear down upon it. There are no delays,--no respites
of ignorance. Right into the midst of our most careless or most
selfish doing, comes the summons that arrests us in the Name of the
King.

"She rose to her feet with a spring.
_That_ was a Piedmontese! And this is the Court of the King!"

She was upon her feet, as if the impulse of the words had lifted
her; she had learned by rote and practice when and how to do it; she
had been poised for the action through the reading of all those last
stanzas.

She did it well. One hand rested by the finger-tips upon the open
volume before her; her glistening robes fell back as she gained her
full height,--she swayed forward toward the assembly that leaned
itself toward her; the left hand threw itself back with a noble
gesture of generous declaring; the fingers curving from the open
palm as it might have been toward the pallet of the dead soldier at
her side. She was utterly motionless for an instant; then, as the
applause broke down the silence, she turned, and grandly passed out
along the stage, and disappeared.

Within the door of the anteroom stood a messenger from the hotel. He
had a telegraph envelope in his hand; he put it into hers.

She tore it open,--not thinking, scarcely noticing; the excitement
of the instant just past moved her nerves,--no apprehension of what
this might be.

Then the lightning reached her: struck her through and through.

"Your ma's dying: come back: no money."

Those last words were a mistake; the whole dispatch, in its absurd
homeliness and its pitiless directness, was the work of old Mrs.
Knoxwell, the blacksmith's wife, used to ha