While she was sitting there alone in the garden weeping her heart out she heard the iron gate open. Peering anxiously through the laurels to see whether some caller had arrived, and feeling that any visitor would be an impossible agony at such a time, she caught sight of her one-time friend, Mercy, the shepherdess. She knew well that on the orders of her husband and mother-in-law the servants always turned away any of her old acquaintances who worked for the Shepherd. Now the sight of Mercy’s beautiful, gentle, and peaceful face brought back to mind all that she had willfully thrown away and lost—her happiness, her lovely work, her friends, and her home, and there broke over her heart an agonizing flood of sorrow. She longed for fellowship again, for the touch of one really loving hand, for the sound of one really friendly voice, and most of all to see and to speak with someone who knew the Shepherd. The longing was irresistible.

If Mercy went to the door she would be turned away with the polite assurance that the mistress was not at home. She must not be allowed to go to the door.

So Umbrage called through the sheltering hedge in a low imploring voice: “Oh Mercy, Mercy! Is that really you? Come to me here.”

Mercy heard the trembling voice and answered at once: “Dear Umbrage, are you really there? Oh, how happy I am to find you at last!” and she came round the laurel hedge and turned toward her friend such a kind and loving look that Umbrage rose, and throwing her arms around Mercy, laid her head on her shoulder and burst into heartbroken sobs.

Thus they stood for a little while, their arms about each other, without speaking, while little Tit-for-Tat gazed up wonderingly into the face of the newcomer.

At last, compelled by her sorrow and heartache, poor Umbrage unburdened herself, pouring out the whole tragic story of her unhappy marriage into the ears of her sympathetic friend.

“I can’t bear it any longer,” she sobbed passionately at the end. “I must leave this home. I can’t live with Resentment and Sullen any longer. I can’t, I can’t! But oh, Mercy, if I leave him they will claim the child! If I am the one who chooses to leave this home, they will have the right to keep little Tit-for-Tat; and if I lose her I cannot live. God have mercy on me! What am I to do? Sometimes I feel the only solution is to end life altogether.”

Mercy, her loving arms around her heartbroken friend, whispered gently: “Umbrage, you are forgetting. There is a solution, quite a different one, to your problem. You know what the solution is. You must tell the Shepherd what you have told me and ask him what you are to do. And then, ‘Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.’”