ok like that. Nothing is so bad as
not trusting God."

"Anthony, Anthony!"... whispered the girl.

"James told us the same story as the gentleman on Sunday," went on the
nun. "But he said no hard word, and he does not condemn. I know his
heart. He does not know why he is released, nor by whose order: but an
order came to let him go, and his papers with it: and he must be out of
England by Monday morning: so he leaves here to-morrow in the litter in
which he came. He is to say mass to-morrow, if he is able."

"Mass? Here?" said the girl, in the same sharp whisper; and her sobbing
ceased abruptly.

"Yes, dear; if he is able to stand and use his hands enough. They have
settled it upstairs."

Isabel continued to look up in her face wildly.

"Ah!" said the old nun again. "You must not look like that. Remember that
he thinks those wounds the most precious things in the world--yes--and
his mother too!"

"I must be at mass," said Isabel; "God means it."

"Now, now," said Mistress Margaret soothingly, "you do not know what you
are saying."

"I mean it," said Isabel, with sharp emphasis; "God means it."

Mistress Margaret took the girl's face between her hands, and looked
steadily down into her wet eyes. Isabel returned the look as steadily.

"Yes, yes," she said, "as God sees us."

Then she broke into talk, at first broken and incoherent in language, but
definite and orderly in ideas, and in her interpretations of these last
months.

Kneeling beside her with her hands clasped on the nun's knee, Isabel told
her all her struggles; disentangling at last in a way that she had never
been able to do before, all the complicated strands of self-will and
guidance and blindness that had so knotted and twisted themselves into
her life. The nun was amazed at the spiritual instinct of this Puritan
child, who ranged her motives so unerringly; dismissing this as of self,
marking this as of God's inspiration, accepting this and rejecting that
element of the circumstances of her life; steering confidently between
the shoals of scrupulous judgment and conscience on the one side, and the
hidden rocks of presumption and despair on the other--these very dangers
that had baffled and perplexed her so long--and tracing out through them
all the clear deep safe channel of God's intention, who had allowed her
to emerge at last from the tortuous and baffling intricacies of character
and circumstance into the wide open sea of His own soverei