CHAPTER II He rose slowly from a high-backed chair beside the fire.!

She was puzzled for the moment. “Oh, the old clergyman,” she answered, recollecting. “Oh, Calvary. All roads lead to Calvary, he thought. It was rather interesting.” “I always was a one for cheerful colours,” explained Mrs. Phillips.

One of Joan’s earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing before the high cheval glass in her mother’s dressing-room. Her clothes lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred of any kind of covering was left to her. She must have been very small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame. Suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face. It hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. And then it swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings. “You mean,” answered Joan quietly, “that if I had let your mother die and had married your father, that he and I would have loved each other to the end; that I should have helped him and encouraged him in all things, so that his success would have been certain. Is that the argument?” “No, not His last,” said Joan: “‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ Love was Christ’s God. He will help us to find Him.”