impossible to think of its having happened before, or to withhold the
telling; the cynicism, which declares this to be an overwhelming
interest in one's internal self, being only partially right, it being
rather the excited and surprised mental condition which is the deep well
from which all art, all expression, breaks forth. She read slowly,
trying to find meaning in each phrase, when suddenly a verse struck her
in its entirety before her lips had finished reading.

"Pure religion, and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to
visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself
unspotted from the world."

She saw exactly what she would do. There was the child, motherless, and
worse than fatherless. She would take him and bring him up unspotted
from the world. It was clearly a leading for her. She had not been
permitted to save the girl, but she might take and protect the boy. She
remembered even the commonsense of Mrs Hankworth. "It's soonest
forgotten about if it's a boy." She was not so much an old maid as a
woman shut up from issue, and she had no fear of a child. And in the
midst of her bewilderment about the girl, about death and the hereafter,
she could see an earthly duty clearly, and pure religion for herself.
She began to sing:

"Who points the clouds their course,
Whom winds and storms obey,
He shall direct thy wandering feet,
He shall point out thy way."

She opened a drawer which held what was left of her father's clothes
without any feeling of incongruity. There were four shirts of checked