The next day was Sunday. It came to the earth, as it comes always, with kindly¹, hallowed hands full of blessings², but found not everywhere hearts and minds open to receive them. Carice Bergan, to be sure, knelt in her accustomed place, in the little church of her fathers, with a face which might almost have rivalled that of an angel in its bright peacefulness, and with all the windows of her soul plainly open to the heavenly sunshine. Bergan Arling, too, conscious that each one of these holy days had its own special gift or grace for him, its own kind and measure of spiritual food, which he could ill afford to lose, knelt in his proper place, and reverently⁴ lent his full, rich voice to swell⁵ the solemn flow of common prayer, or the harmonious⁶ burst of choral praise. And Mrs. Lyte, in her widow's weeds, looking upward in spirit, to the long peace of Paradise, and the shining faces of the redeemed⁷, was glad to believe in "the communion of saints," and rejoiced in the day that was both a foretaste and a promise of the "life everlasting⁸." Even Astra Lyte, though suffering from a vague and nameless depression,—a burden of which, as yet, she felt only the weight and chill, without comprehending, or daring to try to comprehend, whence it came or what it meant,—was sensible of a dim delight, and possibly a latent helpfulness, in the sweet and solemn influences of the day and the place. Here and there, moreover, a soul bowed under the weight of recent affliction, or shaken with the terrors of a newly-awakened conscience, was both awed⁹ and glad to be able to give itself audible expression in words so fit and forcible as those of the Confession¹⁰ and the Litany, and thankful if it might pick up so much as a

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