Mark's
prayed as he had never prayed before--first for himself, whose need
was greatest, and then for Lucy, that she might never know what making
her happy had cost him, and then for Anna, whose name he could not
speak. "That other one," he called her, and his heart kept swelling in
his throat and preventing his utterance, so that the words he would
say never reached his lips.
But God heard them just the same, and knew his child was asking that
Anna might forget him, if to remember him was pain; that she might
learn to love another far worthier than he had ever been.
He did not think of Mrs. Meredith; he had no feeling of resentment
then; he was too wholly crushed to care how his ruin had been brought
about, and, long after the wood fire on the hearth had turned to cold,
gray ashes, he knelt upon the floor and battled with his grief, and
when the morning broke it found him still in the cheerless room where
he had passed the entire night and from which he went forth
strengthened, as he hoped, to do what he believed to be his duty. This
was on Saturday, and on the Sunday following there was no service at
St. Mark's. The rector was sick, the sexton said; "hard sick, too, he
had heard," and the Hetherton carriage, with Lucy in it, drove swiftly
to the rectory, where the quiet and solitude awed and frightened Lucy
as she entered the house and asked the housekeeper how Mr.
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