Mary had been searching in the pockets of his cloak. She had found a paper bag. “You mustn’t get excited,” she said, laying her little work-worn hand upon his shoulder; “or you’ll bring on the bleeding.” “Hullo!” she said. “Are you two concluding a bargain?”!

After the war was over and the men, released from their long terms of solitary confinement, came back to life injured in mind and body, she was almost glad he had escaped. But at the time it filled her soul with darkness. He sat for a minute tattooing with his fingers on the table, before speaking.

There he should have stopped. It would have been a good note on which to finish. But it seemed there was another point he wished to make. Even to the sinner Calvary calls. To Judas—even to him the gates of the life-giving Garden of Gethsemane had not been closed. “With his thirty pieces of silver he could have stolen away. In some distant crowded city of the Roman Empire have lived unknown, forgotten. Life still had its pleasures, its rewards. To him also had been given the choice. The thirty pieces of silver that had meant so much to him! He flings them at the feet of his tempters. They would not take them back. He rushes out and hangs himself. Shame and death. With his own hands he will build his own cross, none to help him. He, too—even Judas, climbs his Calvary. Enters into the fellowship of those who through all ages have trod its stony pathway.” “I met her pretty often during those months that Helen Lavery was running her round,” she said at length. “It always seemed to me to have a touch of the heroic, that absurd effort she was making to ‘qualify’ herself, so that she might be of use to him. I can see her doing something quite big, if she thought it would help him.” “You young imp of Satan!” demanded Mrs. Munday—her feelings of outraged virtue exaggerating perhaps her real sentiments. “What are you doing?”