A light suddenly flashed, clear and warm, into the weak, low, dark heart of poor lonely Alice. “It is mine infirmity!” Not God’s infirmity—not God’s forgetfulness! “No, Alice, never that,” it seemed just as if somebody said to her: “it is only your poor blind heart here in the dark, that cannot see the joy and deliverance that are coming to you—that must come to all God’s people: but He who dwells in the immortal light, and beholds the end from the beginning, knows how to come and set you free—knows when to come and save you.”
The tune changed now. Satan was driven away. The enemy whom Alice Benden had seen that day, and from whom she had suffered so sorely, she should see again no more for ever. From that hour all was joy and hope.
“I will magnify Thee, O God my King, and praise Thy name for ever and ever!”
That was the song she sang through her prison bars in the early morning of the 25th of February. The voice of joy and thanksgiving reached where the moan of pain had not been able to penetrate, to an intently listening ear a few yards from the prison. Then an answering voice of delight came to her from without.
“Alice! Alice! I have found thee!”
Alice looked up, to see her brother Roger’s head and shoulders above the paling which hid all but a strip of sky from her gaze.
“Hast thou been a-searching for me all these weeks, Roger?”
“That have I, my dear heart, ever since thou wast taken from the gaol. How may I win at thee?”
“That thou canst not, Hodge. But we may talk a moment, for my keeper, that is the bell-ringer of the minster, is now at his work there, and will not return for an half-hour well reckoned. Thou wert best come at those times only, or I fear thou shalt be taken.”
“I shall not be taken till God willeth,” said Roger. “I will come again to thee in a moment.”