thony Cardew who had come back from the war was
not the girl who had gone away. She had gone away amazingly ignorant;
what little she had known of life she had learned away at school. But
even there she had not realized the possibility of wickedness and vice
in the world. One of the girls had run away with a music master who
was married, and her name was forbidden to be mentioned. That was
wickedness, like blasphemy, and a crime against the Holy Ghost.

She had never heard of prostitution. Near the camp there was a district
with a bad name, and the girls of her organization were forbidden to so
much as walk in that direction. It took her a long time to understand,
and she suffered horribly when she did. There were depths of wickedness,
then, and of abasement like that in the world. It was a bad world, a
cruel, sordid world. She did not want to live in it.

She had had to reorganize all her ideas of life after that. At first she
was flamingly indignant. God had made His world clean and beautiful, and
covered it with flowers and trees that grew, cleanly begotten, from the
earth. Why had He not stopped there? Why had He soiled it with passion
and lust?

It was a little Red Cross nurse who helped her, finally.

"Very well," she said. "I see what you mean. But trees and flowers are
not God's most beautiful gift to the world."

"I think they are."

"No. It is love."

"I am not talking about love," said Lily, flushing.

"Oh, yes, you are. You have never loved, have you? You are talking of
one of the many things that go to make up love, and out of that one
phase of love comes the most wonderful thing in the world. He gives us
the child."

And again:

"All bodies are not whole, and not all souls. It is wrong to judge life
by its exceptions, or love by its perversions, Lily."

It had been the little nurse finally who cured her, for she secured
Lily's removal to that shady house on a by-street, where the tragedies
of unwise love and youth sought sanctuary. There were prayers there,
morning and evening. They knelt, those girls, in front of their little
wooden chairs, and by far the great majority of them quite simply laid
their burdens before God, and with an equal simplicity, felt that He
would help them out.

"We have erred, and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep. We have
followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have
offended against Thy holy laws.... Restore Thou those who are penitent,