Wife and child—wife and child! had now taken possession of Marshlands. Where she had been much she was now nothing. Where she had been exalted she was brought low. Her day was declining, her reign over. “The wages of sin is death!” And the woman’s tears flowed fast.
On through the flat Cambridgeshire fields—on to the point where Hertfordshire and Essex shake hands—on to the marsh lands, and the nursery-grounds round and about Water Lane and Tottenham—on in the glad light of a summer’s morning across the Lea—and away within sight of the wooded heights of Clapton to Stratford and Mile End—and so to Shoreditch.
On! she had preached her sermon—she had conned her lesson. She had dried her eyes, and was looking over the fields and the river—over the house-tops and the sea of red-tiled roofs, at the life on which she was going to enter.
The hour before dawn is always the darkest; and that night was probably the blackest, in its deep despair, which Phemie Keller ever passed through.
Yet with the dawn came light; and this was the beam of sunshine which stole in on Phemie Keller’s life—Duty.
Were there no sick to tend—no poor to visit—no sorrowing ones to comfort—no children to educate?
Though she had erred she would yet try to do whatever work her hand found to do.
“I will not sit down in idleness, uncle,” she said. “I have sinned—I have suffered—but I will try——”
And as the train, with a shriek and a whistle, steamed into Shoreditch Station, her uncle bent down and kissed her hand with an intense pity, with an unutterable sympathy.
“‘Employment is nature’s physician,’ says Galen,” he remarked. “God in His mercy grant that it may bring you back to health.”