eived into that
Paradise which her ardent imagination conceived so vividly. Surely,
there she should meet him, radiant as the angel of her dream; and then
she would tell him that it was all for his sake that she had refused to
listen to him here. And these sinful longings to see him once more,
these involuntary reachings of her soul after an earthly companionship,
she should find strength to overcome in this pilgrimage. She should go
to Rome,--the very city where the blessed Paul poured out his blood for
the Lord Jesus,--where Peter fed the flock, till his time, too, came to
follow his Lord in the way of the cross. She should even come near to
her blessed Redeemer; she should go up, on her knees, those very steps
to Pilate's hall where He stood bleeding, crowned with thorns,--His
blood, perhaps, dropping on the very stones. Ah, could any mortal love
distract her there? Should she not there find her soul made free of
every earthly thrall to love her Lord alone,--as she had loved Him in
the artless and ignorant days of her childhood,--but better, a thousand
times?

"Good morning to you, pretty dove!" said a voice from without the
garden-wall; and Agnes, roused from her reverie, saw old Jocunda.

"I came down to help you off," she said, as she came into the little
garden. "Why, my dear little saint! you are looking white as a sheet,
and with those tears! What's it all for, baby?"

"Ah, Jocunda! grandmamma is angry with me all the time now. I wish I
could go once more to the Convent and see my dear Mother Theresa. She is
angry, if I but name it; and yet she will not let me do anything here to
help her, and so I don't know _what_ to do."

"Well, at any rate, don't cry, pretty one! Your grandmamma is worked
with hard thoughts. We old folks are twisted and crabbed and full of
knots with disappointment and trouble, like the mulberry-trees that they
keep for vines to run on. But I'll speak to her; I know her ways; she
shall let you go; I'll bring her round."

"So-ho, sister!" said the old soul, hobbling to the door, and looking in
at Elsie, who was sitting flat on the stone floor of her cottage,
sorting a quantity of flax that lay around her. The severe Roman profile
was thrown out by the deep shadows of the interior,--and the piercing
black eyes, the silver-white hair, and the strong, compressed lines of
the mouth, as she worked, and struggled with the ghosts of her former
life, made her look like no unapt personification