Page:Wiggin--Marm Lisa.djvu/210

198 "Have you heard all?" she asked.

"Yes, everything!" faltered Mrs. Grubb with quivering lips and downcast eyelids.

Mary turned towards Lisa’s bed. "Mrs. Grubb," she said, looking straight into that lady’s clear, shallow eyes, "I think Lisa has earned her freedom, and the right to ask a Christmas gift of you. Stand on the other side of the cot and put your hand in mine.  I ask you for the last time, will you give this unfinished, imperfect life into my keeping, if I promise to be faithful to it unto the end, whatever it may be?"

I suppose that every human creature, be he ever so paltry, has his hour of effulgence, an hour when the mortal veil grows thin and the divine image stands revealed, endowing him, for a brief space at least with a kind of awful beauty and majesty.

It was Mistress Mary’s hour. Her pure, unswerving spirit shone with a white and steady radiance that illuminated Mrs. Grubb’s soul to its very depths, showing her in a flash the feeble flickerings and waverings of her own trivial purposes. At that moment her eye was fitted with a new lens, through which the road to the summit of the Tehachapi Mountains and Mahatma-