Was I right?

by Mrs. O. F. Walton

When Maggie had gone downstairs, taking her new writing-case with her, that she might begin at once to answer her little friend's letter, I got up and locked my door, and then sat down to think over what I had heard.

The news of Claude's engagement had come upon me like a thunder-clap. I tried to reason with myself that I ought to be very glad that Claude was engaged, and that as I could not be his wife he had found some one else to make him happy. And yet it was so soon, so very soon, for Claude to forget his love for me. I had thought that he cared for me more than that. I had thought that he held my love too dear, so quickly and so easily to exchange it for another's.

I suppose it was my pride that was wounded, and that the tears which came, in spite of myself, and rolled down my cheeks, were tears of mortification. I felt very vexed with myself that it should be so. I called myself all sorts of hard names, and wiped my eyes, and tried to think how nice it was that all was so comfortably settled for me; how delightful it was that I could feel that I had done the right thing, and yet that I had not brought a gloom over the whole of Claude's life. And yet, at the bottom of my heart, I detected a secret hope, which had been hidden there the last few weeks, that, some day or other, Claude might give up his infidel notions and become a real Christian, and that then we might meet again and become to each other what he had so earnestly wished us to be. I had even thought that perhaps this trouble might be the means of making Claude look into the reality of religion, and believe in that Saviour who is the only true source of comfort, and that thus the great obstacle to our union might be taken away.

Not that Claude was by any means my beau-ideal of all that a man and a husband should be. But then he was, after all, the nicest man I had ever met, and it might be that my ideal was a thing of imagination, never met with in real life.

And on this particular day I was feeling very lonely and desolate. I was about to turn out into the world alone—alone amongst strangers. I was going to a great and fashionable household, where, no doubt, I should be looked down upon, and despised as poor, and a dependent.

I had no one to take care of me, or to shield me from the rough places which I should be sure to come across. There was no one in the world that really belonged to me except my sister Maggie, and she was but a child. I felt very unprotected, desolate, and forsaken. I took up my Bible and turned wearily over the pages, if, perchance, my eyes might fall upon some words of comfort. And the words which caught my attention were these, in the thirteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel:

"Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end."

"Unto the end," an unchanging, an unvarying, an untiring love. I had chosen that love in preference to Claude's. Had I made a bad exchange? I had given up a love which had proved itself, at the best, but fickle and shallow, and I had chosen Christ's love, the love of Him of whom it was written, that having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.

"His 'own.'" Did that indeed mean me? Or did it only apply to the few disciples gathered round Him in these last hours of His life on earth? Was it only these whom He loved unto the end? Or could I take up the words, and make them my star of comfort? Could I make them apply to myself now, as they applied to the apostles then?

Was it true now that I was His—His own? Was it true that I was in the world—in the wide, desolate world, alone, just as these apostles were so soon to be, and was it true that He would love me in spite of all my failings and all my sins, and that He would love me unto the end? Could it be true?