her mind there flitted
half phrases of the humanitarian, the materialist, the agnostic. It
seemed as if their views of the wreck on the bed pressed upon all her
consciousness. But, just as they had never succeeded in silencing the
voice of that great drama of faith and prayer through the ages, so she
could not dull to her own consciousness the strange, spiritual vitality
that poured out in this triumphant call to the powers on high to come
forth in all their glory to receive the inestimable treasure of the
redeemed soul of Pat Moloney.

CHAPTER XVI

MOLLY'S LETTER TO HER MOTHER

There followed after that night a quite new experience for Molly. It was
the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature. She was
astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead
of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational--a lower
part of her nature,--they now seemed quite curiously rational and
established in possession of her faculties. Her mind seemed more
satisfied than it had ever been before. She did not know in what she
believed, but she felt a different view of life in which men seemed less
utterly mean, and women less of hypocrites. Externally it worked
something in this way.

The day on which Pat Moloney died at dawn she could not rest so much as
she intended, to make up for the short night. She wrote one or two brief
notes begging to be let off engagements, and told the servants to say
she was not at home. She could not keep quite still, and she did not
want to go out. Gradually, as the day wore on, she worked herself into
more and more excitement. Her imagination pictured what might be the
outcome of such a view of life and death as seemed to have taken hold of
her. In her usual moods she would have thought with sarcasm that such
were the symptoms of "conversion" in a revivalist. But now there was no
critical faculty awake for cynicism; the critical faculty was full of a
solemn kind of joy. Next there came, after some hours of a sort of
surprise at this sudden and vehement sense of uplifting, the wish for
action and for sacrifice. Her mind returned to the concrete, and the
circumstances of her life. And then there came a most unwelcome thought.
If Molly wanted to sacrifice herself indeed, and wished to do some real
good about which there could be no self-delusion, was there not one duty
quite obviously in her path, her duty as a child? Had she ever made any
attempt to hel