debate, no claim to satisfaction, to joy?

She locks here hands round her knees, conscious, poor soul, that the
worst struggle is _here_, the quickest agony _here_. But she does not
waver for an instant. And her weapons are all ready. The inmost soul of
her is a fortress well stored, whence at any moment the mere personal
craving of the natural man can be met, repulsed, slain.

'_Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God the farther he departeth
from all earthly comfort._'

'_If thou couldst perfectly annihilate thyself and empty thyself of
all created love, then should I be constrained to flow into thee with
greater abundance of grace._'

'_When thou lookest unto the creature the sight of the Creator is
withdrawn from thee._'

'_Learn in all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy
Creator..._'

She presses the sentences she has so often meditated in her long
solitary walks about the mountains into her heart. And one fragment of
George Herbert especially rings in her ears, solemnly, funereally:

'_Thy Saviour sentenced joy!_'

Ah, sentenced it forever--the personal craving, the selfish need, that
must be filled at any cost. In the silence of the descending night
Catherine quietly, with tears, carried out that sentence, and slew her
young, new-born joy at the feet of the Master.

She stayed where she was for a while after this crisis in a kind of
bewilderment and stupor, but maintaining a perfect outward tranquillity.
Then there was a curious little epilogue.

'It is all over,' she said to herself, tenderly. 'But he has taught me
so much--he has been so good to me--he is so good! Let me
take to my heart some counsel--some word of his, and obey it
sacredly--silently--for these, days' sake.'

Then she fell thinking again, and she remembered their talk about Rose.
How often she had pondered it since! In this intense trance of feeling
it breaks upon her finally that he is right. May it not be that he, with
his clearer thought, his wider knowledge of life, has laid his finger
on the weak point in her guardianship of her sisters? 'I have tried
to stifle her passion,' she thought; 'to push it out of the way as a
hindrance. Ought I not rather to have taught her to make of it a step in
the ladder--to have moved her to bring her gifts to the altar? Oh, let
me take his word for it--be ruled by him in this one thing, once!'

She bowed her face on her knees again. It seemed to her that she had