Agnes trembled in an agony of real belief, and with a vivid terror of the world to come such as belonged to the almost physical certainty with which the religious teaching of her time presented it to the popular mind. Was she, indeed, the cause of such awful danger to his soul? Might a false step now, a faltering human weakness, indeed plunge that soul, so dear, into a fiery abyss without bottom or shore? Should she forever hear his shrieks of torture and despair, his curses on the hour he had first known her? Her very blood curdled, her nerves froze, as she thought of it, and she threw herself on her knees and prayed with an anguish that brought the sweat in beaded drops to her forehead,--strange dew for so frail a lily!--and her prayer rose above all intercession of saints, above the seat even of the Virgin Mother herself, to the heart of her Redeemer, to Him who some divine instinct told her was alone mighty to save. We of the present day may look on her distress as unreal, as the result of a misguided sense of religious obligation; but the great Hearer of Prayer regards each heart in its own scope of vision, and helps not less the mistaken than the enlightened distress. And for that matter, who is enlightened? who carries to God's throne a trouble or a temptation in which there is _not_ somewhere a misconception or a mistake?
And so it came to pass. Agnes rose from prayer with an experience which has been common to the members of the True Invisible Church, whether Catholic, Greek, or Protestant. "In the day when I cried Thou answeredst me, and strengthenedst me with strength in my soul." She had that vivid sense of the sustaining presence and sympathy of an Almighty Saviour which is the substance of which all religious forms and appliances are the shadows; her soul was stayed on God, and was at peace, as truly as if she had been the veriest Puritan maiden that ever worshipped in a New-England meeting-house. She felt a calm superiority to all things earthly,--a profound reliance on that invisible aid which comes from God alone.
She was standing at her window, deep in thought, when Giulietta entered,--fresh and blooming,--bearing the breakfast-tray.
"Come, my little princess, here I am," she said, "with your breakfast! How do you find yourself, this morning?"
