Gratia's Trials — page 122: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

GRATIA’S TRIALS. | 113 It was no earthly voice the little child listened to so raptur- ously. For all we children of earth know, it might have been the voices of cherubim and seraphim before the Throne, for as _ the words quivered on Raymond's lips he died. ~ **Don’t ye cry, dear—don’t ye cry!” comforted kind Mrs Playfair, her own tears raining down on the little child whose eyes she was closing. ‘‘He’s gone to his mother now, and there’s no one can be toachild what his mother was, unless it’s the good Saviour, and He's got ‘em both now.” i *K x *k x * * Once more in the star-sprinkled dark Gratia Kempfield left her father’s house—ah, how differently from the glad hopes with which she had entered it! The apples of Sodom, for which she had periled so much, had turned to ashes in her grasp—the little star she had worshiped had gone down in the great sea of death. And all that she carried away from the old > home, where they had all been so happy together once, was one little flaxen curl pressed close to her aching heart. As she stood there the sound of jingling sleigh-bells chimed upon her ear. She stood aside to let the vehicle skim by, and as it shot past the sound of her step-mother'’s hard, heartless laugh rang out. r The jarring resohance roused her to new vigor. ‘Not yet!” she said to herself, setting her teeth close together. ‘‘It would please Aer too well were I to fail—to break down in the conflict—to die. There is something worth winning in the world—a triumph which shall be the bitterness. of gall to her /” Eomicbooks.co im