'Forgive them, Father!' loud he cried,
On the rugged cross!"

"Oh, thank you!" Miss Howe exclaimed. Then she murmured again, "That's
just what I mean."

A blankness came over the girl's face as a light cloud will cross the
moon. She regarded Hilda from behind it with penetrant anxiety. "Did you
really enjoy that hymn?" she asked.

"Indeed I did."

"Then, dear Miss Howe, I think you cannot be very far from the kingdom."

"I? Oh, I have my part in a kingdom." Her voice caressed the idea. "And
the curious thing is that we are all aristocrats who belong to it. Not
the vulgar kind, you understand--but no, you don't understand. You'll
have to take my word for it." Miss Howe's eyes sought a red hibiscus
flower that looked in at the window half drowned in sunlight, and the
smile in them deepened. The flower admitted so naïvely that it had no
business to be there.

"Is it the Kingdom of God and His righteousness?" Laura Filbert's clear
glance was disturbed by a ray of curiosity, but the inflexible quality
of her tone more than counterbalanced this.

"There's nothing about it in the Bible, if that's what you mean. And yet
I think the men who wrote 'The time of the singing of birds has come,'
and 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills,' must have belonged to it."
She paused, with an odd look of discomfiture. "But one shouldn't talk