They turned up Church Street. Joan confided to Mary what a rotten Christmas she had had, all by herself, without a soul to speak to except her landlady, who had brought her meals and had been in such haste to get away. Joan had taken a liking to the girl. It was a spiritual, vivacious face with frank eyes and a firm mouth; and the voice was low and strong.!

“It only came an hour or two ago,” her father explained. “If he wrote to you by the same post, you may have left before it arrived.” “No,” said Joan. “But perhaps that’s the way the best fights are fought—without thinking.”

“And this is Hilda,” concluded Mrs. Phillips. “She ought to be in bed if she hadn’t a naughty Daddy who spoils her.” 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.” He shrugged his shoulders. “No reason why it shouldn’t be,” he said. “I’ve generally found him right.”