zeal for God, and hath faithfully adored the Creator of all things."

Was it an immense, an appalling impertinence--this great drama? Was it a
mere mockery of the impotence and darkness of man's life? Would the
priest say all this at the death-bed of the drunken beggar, of the
voluptuous tyrant, of the woman who had been too hard or too weak in the
bonds of the flesh? Was it a last great delusion, a last panacea given
by the Church to those who had consented to bandage their eyes and crook
their knees in childish obedience? Vaguely in her mind there flitted
half phrases of the humanitarian, the materialist, the agnostic. It
seemed as if their views of the wreck on the bed pressed upon all her
consciousness. But, just as they had never succeeded in silencing the
voice of that great drama of faith and prayer through the ages, so she
could not dull to her own consciousness the strange, spiritual vitality
that poured out in this triumphant call to the powers on high to come
forth in all their glory to receive the inestimable treasure of the
redeemed soul of Pat Moloney.




CHAPTER XVI

MOLLY'S LETTER TO HER MOTHER


There followed after that night a quite new experience for Molly. It was
the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature. She was
astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead
of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational--a lower