It was the same child who had come and gone so strangely before! He held out his hands to her, and fell on his face at her feet like one dead.

Then, with a horror of pitiful amazement, she saw a great cross marked in two cruel stripes on his back; and the thoughts that thereupon went coursing through her loving imagination, it would be hard to set forth.

Could it be that the Lord was still, child and man, suffering for his race, to deliver his brothers and sisters from their sins ?--wandering, enduring, beaten, blessing still?
accepting the evil, slaying it, and returning none?
his patience the one rock where the evil word finds no echo; his heart the one gulf into which the dead-sea wave rushes with no recoil--from which ever flows back only purest water, sweet and cool; the one abyss of destroying love, into which all wrong tumbles, and finding no reaction, is lost, ceases for evermore?
there, in its own cradle, the primal order is still nursed, still restored; thence is still sent forth afresh, to leaven with new life the world ever ageing! Shadowy and vague they were--but vaguely shadowed were thoughts like these in Janet's mind, as she stood half-stunned, regarding for one moment motionless the prostrate child and his wrongs.

The next she lifted him in her arms, and holding him tenderly to her mother-heart, carried him into the house, murmuring over him dove-like sounds of pity and endearment mingled with indignation.

There she laid him on his side in her bed, covered him gently over, and hastened to the little byre at the end of the cottage, to get him some warm milk.