lking, as all were talking,
of the sight that Meaux should see to-morrow.

Besides Jacqueline, there was hardly another person in this great
building, six stories high, every room of which had usually a tenant at
this hour. She sat by her window, and looked at the dusky town, over
which the moon was rising. But her thoughts were far away; over many a
league they wandered.

Once more she stood on the playground of her toilsome childhood. She
recalled many a year of sacrificing drudgery, which now she could not
name such,--for another reason than that which had heretofore prevented
her from calling it a sacrifice. She remembered these years of wrong and
of extortion,--they received their proper name now,--years whose mirth
and leisure she had quietly foregone, but during which she had borne a
burden that saddened youth, while it also dignified it,--a burden which
had made her heart's natural cheerfulness the subject of self-reproach,
and her maiden dreams and wishes matter for tears, for shame, for
confession, for prayer.

Now Victor Le Roy's words came to her very strangely; powerfully they
moved her. She believed them in this solitude, where at leisure she
could meditate upon them. A vision more fair and blessed than she had
ever imagined rose before her. There was no suffering in it, and no
sorrow; it was full of peace. Already, in the heaven to which she had
hoped her toil would give him at length admission, her father had found
his home. There was a glory in his rest not reflected from her filial
love, but from the all-availing love of Christ.

Then--delay the rigor of your judgment!--she began,--yes, she, this
Jacqueline, began to count the cost of what she had done. She was not a
sordid soul, she had not a miserly nature. Before she had gone far in
that strange computation, she paused abruptly, with a crimsoned face,
and not with tearless eyes. Counting the cost! Estimating the sacrifice!
Had, then, her purpose been less holy because excited by falsehood and
sustained through delusion? Was she less loving and less true, because
deceived? And was she to lament that Christ, the one and only Priest,
rather than another instrumentality, was the deliverer of her beloved
from the power of death?

No ritual was remembered, and no formula consulted, when she cried
out,--"It is so! and I thank Thee! Only give me now, my Jesus, a
purpose as holy as that Thou hast taken away!"

But she had not come into her chamber to