abandoned him. Worst of all to the heart of Hester was the fact that so
few people were present, many of them children at half-price, some of
whom seemed far from satisfied with the amusement offered them. When the
hall and the gas--but that would not be much--and the advertising were
paid for, what would the poor old scrag-end of humanity, with his
yellow-white neckcloth knotted hard under his left ear, have over for
his supper? Was there any woman to look after him? and would she give
him anything fit to eat? Hester was all but crying to think she could do
nothing for him--that he was so far from her and beyond her help, when
she remembered the fat woman with curls hanging down her cheeks, who had
taken their money at the door. Apparently she was his wife--and seemed
to thrive upon it! But alas for the misery of the whole thing!

When they came out and breathed again the blue, clean, rain-washed air
instead of the musty smells of the hall, involuntarily Hester's eyes
rose to the vault whose only keystone is the will of the Father, whose
endless space alone is large enough to picture the heart of God: how was
that old man to get up into the high regions and grow clean and wise?
For all the look, he must belong there as well as she! And were there
not thousands equally and more miserable in the world--people wrapped in
no tenderness, to whom none ministered, left if not driven--so it seemed
at the moment to Hester--to fold themselves in their own selfishness?
And was there nothing she, a favored one of the family, could do to
help, to comfort, to lift up one such of her own flesh and blood?--to
rescue a heart from the misery of hopelessness?--to make this one or
that feel there was a heart of love and refuge at the centre of things?
Hester had a large, though not hitherto entirely active aspiration in
her; and now, the moment she began to flutter her weak wings, she found
the whole human family hanging upon her, and that she could not rise
except in raising them along with her. For the necessities of our