That time seemed long, long ago—ay, was long ago, before he was the city millionaire and husband of the dashing, self-willed Lottie, who, while professing to believe just what Kitty did, practiced a far different creed. All the tithes of anise, and mint and cumin she brought, but she neglected the weightier matters, and her dark eyes flashed angrily for a moment when she heard Kitty’s reason for declining her Sunday dinner.
“As if she were so much better than anybody else,” she said, and she was going on to say more when her husband cut her short with, “I suppose she does not feel like going straight from the altar to a dinner party. Isn’t it communion next Sunday in your church?”
Yes, it was, but Lottie had forgotten that, and her face flushed as her husband thus reminded her of it. The two did not seem to be wholly congruous, and so she staid home the next Sunday, and felt a strange feeling of disquiet, and thought more of Kitty Craig, and how she would look with that expression of peace on her face when she turned away from the altar than she did of the grand dinner which was being prepared in her kitchen, and which, though pronounced a success by those of her guests who cared nothing for the fourth commandment, seemed to her a failure. Nothing suited her; everything was wrong, from the color of the gravy to the flower in her step-mother’s hair, and the fit of Mrs. Orr’s dress; and when all was over, and the company gone, and she was alone with her thoughts and the Bible she tried to read, and, which by some chance she opened at the words. “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” she said to herself, “I don’t believe I’ll ever try to have another dinner party on Sunday.”
She went to see Kitty the next day and chided her for her absence, and called her a little Methodist and a Puritan, and asked how she came to be so strait-laced, and ended with: “But I believe you are right after all, only here in the city people do differently, and you will be like us in time.”
“I trust I never may forget that God is in the city as well as in the country,” was Kitty’s reply, which Lottie pondered long in her heart, and which at last bore the fruit which ripens on the everlasting hills of glory.
It is two years since the night of the musicale, and more than one carriage with servants in livery and ladies gayly dressed has stopped at Kitty’s door, and Kitty has the entree to many a fashionable house. But having tasted the once coveted apple and found how unsatisfying it was, she has put it from her and sees but little of the beau monde save such as she sometimes meets at the house of Lottie Steele, who is now her best friend, and whose carriage stands at her door on the night of which we write. There was a message from Mr. Steele to John and Kitty Craig, telling them to come immediately, for Lottie, he feared, was dying.
There were tears in Kitty’s eyes, and a throb of pain in her heart, as she read the note and then prepared for the drive. There was a hushed air about the house as if death had already entered there, and the servant who opened the door spoke in a low whisper, as in reply to Kitty’s questions she said, “Very low, and asking for you. Will you go up now?”
Without waiting to throw aside her wrappings Kitty followed up the stairs, past the room where Lottie’s week-old baby girl was sleeping, and on to the chamber where the young mother lay. There was the pallor of death on her face, and her eyes seemed larger and blacker than ever. But they lighted up suddenly and her white cheek flushed when she saw Kitty come in.
“Oh, Mrs. Craig, I am so glad. I wanted to tell you how much I owe you, and that but for you I could not be as happy lying here right in the face of death—for I am going to die, I know it and feel it—but first I want to see baby baptized, and you and your husband must be her sponsors. Please, Am, tell them to bring her in.”