the little garden
before the window, that, with the shades of evening, might lie with the
delicate white and glossy dark of their petals trampled in the roadside
dust. When the sun had sunk, and the twilight was deepening, Janet might
be sitting there, heated, maddened, sobbing out her griefs with selfish
passion, and wildly wishing herself dead.

Mrs. Raynor had been reading about the lost sheep, and the joy there is
in heaven over the sinner that repenteth. Surely the eternal love she
believed in through all the sadness of her lot, would not leave her child
to wander farther and farther into the wilderness till here was no
turning--the child so lovely, so pitiful to others, so good, till she was
goaded into sin by woman's bitterest sorrows! Mrs. Raynor had her faith
and her spiritual comforts, though she was not in the least evangelical
and knew nothing of doctrinal zeal. I fear most of Mr. Tryan's hearers
would have considered her destitute of saving knowledge, and I am quite
sure she had no well-defined views on justification. Nevertheless, she
read her Bible a great deal, and thought she found divine lessons
there--how to bear the cross meekly, and be merciful. Let us hope that
there is a saving ignorance, and that Mrs. Raynor was justified without
knowing exactly how.

She tried to have hope and trust, though it was hard to believe that the
future would be anything else than the harvest of the seed that was being
sown before her eyes. But always there is seed being sown silently and
unseen, and everywhere there come sweet flowers without our foresight or
labour. We reap what we sow, but Nature has love over and above that
justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no
planting of ours.

Chapter 6

Most people must have agreed with Mrs. Raynor that the Confirmation that
day was a pretty sight, at least when those slight girlish forms and fair
young faces moved in a white rivulet along the aisles, and flowed into
kneeling semicircles under the light of the great chancel window,
softened by patches of dark old painted glass; and one would think that
to look on while a pair of venerable hands pressed such young heads, and
a venerable face looked upward for a blessing on them, would be very
likely to make the heart swell gently, and to moisten the eyes. Yet I
remember the eyes seemed very dry in Milby Church that day,
notwithstanding that the Bishop was an old man, and probably vene