“No matter what your past has been, my poor child, you 79 must remember there is a future. Take up the burden again, and bear it nobly; go back to your home, and commence life anew.”
“I have no home and no friends,” she sighed, hopelessly.
“Poor child,” he said, pityingly, “is it as bad as that?”
A sudden idea seemed to occur to him.
“You are a perfect stranger to me,” he said, “but I believe you to be an honorable girl, and I should like to befriend you, as I would pray Heaven to befriend a daughter of mine if she were similarly situated. If I should put you in a way of obtaining your own living as companion to an elderly lady in a distant city, would you be willing to take up the tangled threads of your life again, and wait patiently until God saw fit to call you––that is, you would never attempt to take your life into your own hands again?” he asked, slowly. “Remember, such an act is murder, and a murderer can not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
He never forgot the startled, frightened glance that swept over the beautiful face, plainly discernible in the white moonlight, nor the quiver of the sweet, tremulous voice as Daisy answered:
“I think God must have intended me to live, or He would not have sent you here to save me,” she answered, impulsively. “Twice I have been near death, and each time I have been rescued. I never attempted to take my own life but this once. I shall try and accept my fate and live out my weary life.”
“Bravely spoken, my noble girl,” replied her rescuer, heartily.
“I must go far away from here, though,” she continued, shuddering; “I am sorely persecuted here.”
The old man listened gravely to her disconnected, incoherent words, drawing but one conclusion from them––“the lover who had cast her off was pursuing the child, as her relentless foe, to the very verge of death and despair.”