lifted a large book
from the window-sill, laid it on the small round table, opened it
wide, and sat down before it. It was a homely, workaday-looking book,
and she did not read a word of it, though her eyes were upon the page.
But it was the Bible. And the Bible is like the sunshine, it comforts
and cheers us only to sit down in its presence.

And very soon Joan lifted her hand and laid it across the open page.
It was like taking the hand of a friend. God knows what strength, what
virtue, there was in that movement! For she immediately covered her
face with her other hand and tears began to fall, and anon mighty
whispered words parted her lips--words that went from the mother's
heart to the heart of God! How can such prayer ever fail?

In the morning John Penelles met his daughter, not with the petulant
anger of a wounded woman, but with a graver and more reasonable
reproof. "Denas, my dear," he said, and he gently stroked her hair as
he spoke, "Denas, you didn't do right yesterday; did you now? But you
do be sorry for it, I see; so let the trouble go. But no more of it!
No more out in the dark, my girl, either for bride-making or for
corpse-waking, and as for the man who kept you out, let him ask God to
keep him from under my hand. That is all about it. Come and give
father his tea, and then we will mend the nets together; and if
Saturday be fair, Denas, we will go to St. Merryn and see your Aunt
Agnes. 'You don't want to go?' Aw, yes, my dear, you do want to go.
You be vexed now; and not you that should be vexed at all, but your
mother and I. There, then! No more of it!"

He spoke the last words as if he was at the end of his patience, and
then turned sharply toward the broiled fish and hot tea which Joan was
placing on the table. The face of Denas angered him, it was so
indifferent and so wretched. He could have laughed away a little
temper and excused it, for he was not an unjust nor even an
unsympathetic man; and he realized his daughter's youth and her
natural craving for those things which youth considers desirable.

But the utter hopelessness of her attitude, her refusal to eat, her
silence, her sighs, the unsuitableness of the dress she wore to the
humble duties of her station, her disinclination to talk of what
troubled her, or indeed to talk at all--both John and Joan felt these
things to be a wrong, deliberate and perpetual, against their love and
their home and their daily happiness.

It was certainly