"It will help me to bear what mother says, if I see you by me," he pleaded.
God forbid that I should transcribe that letter.

It was written from the depths of such sorrow as He only can fully sympathise with, who for thirty years pitched his tent in the valley of human misery.

By the former mail Mrs.Williams had heard of Verny's melancholy death; by the next she had been told that her only other child, Eric, was not dead indeed, but a wandering outcast, marked with the brand of terrible suspicion.

Let her agony be sacred; it was God who sent it, and he only enabled her to endure it.

With bent head, and streaming eyes, and a breast that heaved involuntarily with fitful sobs, Eric listened as though to his mother's voice, and only now and then he murmured low to himself, "O mother, mother, mother--but I am forgiven now.