he goeth."

As he ended thus, the curate bent over and looked at Leopold. But
the poor boy had not listened to a word he said. Something in his
tone had soothed him, but the moment he ceased, the vein of his
grief burst out bleeding afresh. He clasped his thin hands together,
and looked up in an agony of hopeless appeal to the blue sky, now
grown paler as in fear of the coming cold, though still the air was
warm and sweet, and cried,

"Oh! if God would only be good and unmake me, and let darkness cover
the place where once was me! That would be like a good God! All I
should be sorry for then would be, that there was not enough of me
left for a dim flitting Will-o'-the-wisp of praise, ever singing my
thankfulness to him that I was no more.--Yet even then my deed would
remain, for I dare not ask that she should die outright also--that
would be to heap wrong upon wrong. What an awful thing being is! Not
even my annihilation could make up for my crime, or rid it out of
the universe."

"True, Leopold!" said the curate. "Nothing but the burning love of
God can rid sin out of anywhere. But are you not forgetting him who
surely knew what he undertook when he would save the world? No more
than you could have set that sun flaming overhead, with its
million-miled billows and its limitless tempests of fire, can you
tell what the love of God is, or what it can do for you, if only by
enlarging your love with the inrush of itself. Few have such a cry
to raise to the Father as you, such a claim of sin and helplessness
to heave up before him, such a joy even to offer to the great
Shepherd who cannot rest while one sheep strays from his flock, one