O holy love! O burning flame!

Why should I longer roam

Forth from the heart of God I came

And yearn back to my home.

Send forth thy truth, O shining Light,

That I may follow till

I come at last, before the night,

Up to thy holy hill.

For there my soul longs to abide,

Within the Holy Place,

And, when the veil is drawn aside,

To see my Father’s face.

O thou from whom my spirit came,

And wanders in this wild,

Behold I bear thy lovely name,

Lead home thy wandering child.

As she finished singing there came another knock on the door, low but quite clear. Gloomy and Spiteful again started and looked at one another questioningly and then at Grace and Glory. A lovely color had flooded into her cheeks and her eyes shone like stars. She knew in an instant whose hand it was that knocked on the door of that dismal attic. As her two cousins stared at her speechlessly the knock came again, a little louder, a little more insistent.

“Oh!” entreated Grace and Glory, “Oh! Spiteful and Gloomy, it is he whom we have been talking about. It is the Shepherd himself. Open the door and tell him to come in!”

Every drop of blood seemed to drain away from Spiteful’s already pallid cheeks. She shrank back, casting a stricken look around the wretched room and at her own ragged clothes which scarcely covered the bruises on her body. She cringed backwards, covering her face with her hands.

For a minute there was dead silence, so complete it seemed as though the beating of every heart in the room must become audible. Then through the silence there came a third knock, and a man’s strong, gentle, patient voice was heard saying, “May I come in?”

Gloomy rose to her feet. She was trembling from head to foot but she touched her sister’s arm and pointed wordlessly and entreatingly towards the door.

Then poor Spiteful, the sorrowful, destitute owner of the miserable attic, stumbled across the room and opened the door.

The Shepherd stepped inside, tall, powerful, with regal mien, and yet with a look of infinite compassion on his face. Spiteful looked at him just once, and then cast herself full length on the ground at his feet with a bitter cry of anguish, saying, “Lord, have pity on me.”

He put out his hand to lift her up, but before he could do so or speak a word, there was Gloomy, the one-time haughty daughter-in-law of old Lord Fearing, kneeling at his feet beside her sister, whispering through trembling lips, “Have mercy on me also, Lord; don’t leave me outside thy grace.”

As he raised them both together with words of love and compassion, the look on the Shepherd’s face was that of one who at last has achieved his heart’s desire—of the Savior who knows that now he may begin the heavenly work of saving.

Grace and Glory, with Joy and Peace standing beside her, looked on and said in her heart, “No, not even up on the High Places have we known such joy as this. This attic ‘is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven’” (Gen. 28:17).