"Ah, but you have never known sorrow!" and Mrs. Morner drew her sable draperies around her with a sigh. "Just look at your face! Not a shadow upon it and hardly a wrinkle. You are one of the favored ones with whom life has been all sunshine."
Mrs. Everidge laughed brightly. She had never pined to pose as a martyr before the world.
"God has been wondrous kind to me," she said, "but there is a cure for all sorrow, dear friend, in his love. The great Physician is the only one who has a medicament for that disease. It is not forgetfulness, you know—he does not deal in narcotics—but he lays his pierced hand upon our bleeding hearts and stills their pain. Our memory is as fresh as ever, but it is memory with the sting taken out."
"Ah, but you cannot understand—how should you? You have always had everything you wanted, and you have never lost anything or longed for what has been denied you!" and a toilworn woman, whose life seemed one long battle with disappointment, looked enviously at Miss Diana, over whose peaceful face life's twilight was falling in tender colors.
"Not quite everything I wanted, dear," said Miss Diana softly, "but I have come to know that God himself is sufficient for all our needs."
"Our dear Miss Diana has learned that 'we must sit in the sunshine if we would reflect the rainbow,'" said Aunt Marthe in her low tones. "It is a good rule, 'for every look we take at self, to take ten looks at Jesus.' She lives in the light of his smile."
Then through the open window they heard Evadne singing,
"Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west,
And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness,
Round our restlessness, his rest."
And the weary soul folded its tired wings, all wounded with vain beatings against the prison bars of circumstance, and was hushed into a great stillness against the heart of its Father.
* * * * *