And one fragment of George Herbert especially rings in her ears, solemnly, funereally: '_Thy Saviour sentenced joy!_' Ah, sentenced it forever--the personal craving, the selfish need, that must be filled at any cost.

In the silence of the descending night Catherine quietly, with tears, carried out that sentence, and slew her young, new-born joy at the feet of the Master.
She stayed where she was for a while after this crisis in a kind of bewilderment and stupor, but maintaining a perfect outward tranquillity.
Then there was a curious little epilogue.
'It is all over,' she said to herself, tenderly.

'But he has taught me so much--he has been so good to me--he is so good! Let me take to my heart some counsel--some word of his, and obey it sacredly--silently--for these, days' sake.' Then she fell thinking again, and she remembered their talk about Rose.
How often she had pondered it since! In this intense trance of feeling it breaks upon her finally that he is right.

May it not be that he, with his clearer thought, his wider knowledge of life, has laid his finger on the weak point in her guardianship of her sisters?
'I have tried to stifle her passion,' she thought; 'to push it out of the way as a hindrance.

Ought I not rather to have taught her to make of it a step in the ladder--to have moved her to bring her gifts to the altar?
Oh, let me take his word for it--be ruled by him in this one thing, once!' She bowed her face on her knees again.