“So I heard from Mrs. Valiant,” said her aunt icily. “But I shall certainly not call you by anything but your real name. It will take more than just a new name, I can assure you, to make me forget what you were before. To me you will always be Much-Afraid.”

“Well, I can understand that too,” said Grace and Glory, “and you may call me by the old name if you so please. But,” she added smilingly, “Grace is a shorter and easier name to say, and it exactly describes the means by which all the happiness and peace and healing have come to me. Dear Aunt Dismal, if only I could persuade you, in your sorrow and grief and pain, to turn to the One who so graciously and wonderfully helped me!”

A flush of angry color appeared in her aunt’s cheeks. “Do I understand you to refer to—” she stumbled over the hated name “to the Shepherd, Much-Afraid?”

“Yes,” answered her niece earnestly.

“I beg, no, rather I command, that you will not ever mention that name to me again,” said Mrs. Dismal Forebodings in a voice shaking with angry excitement. “You know well enough what all of us thought about your disgraceful behavior, forsaking all your relatives in the most heartless manner! But do you know what happened afterwards? Do you know that it was that—that Shepherd of yours—who trumped up the false charge against my unhappy son, Craven, which resulted in his being put in prison? My son, my only son, treated as a common felon and sentenced to a six months’ term of imprisonment.”

Grace and Glory, who had come to the cottage with her heart overflowing with love and compassionate longing to help her aunt escape from the misery which she herself had known, could think of nothing to say. She had her own personal memories of Craven Fear’s bullyings, and could well understand how much some hapless victim must have rejoiced to be delivered by the Shepherd out of his clutches; also that a term in prison might well prove to be a salutary, though bitter, lesson to him. But she did not feel that it was the moment to suggest all this to his mother. So she really did not know what to say.

It was the dreadful contrast to everything which she had hoped and expected, thought Grace and Glory to herself, which made it so unspeakably difficult. Up there on the High Places in the Kingdom of Love, where every thought was love, and her companions Joy and Peace were never absent, how different things had looked! She remembered how but a short time before she had been sitting beside the King in the royal gardens, and they had looked down into this valley, and her heart had ached and throbbed with compassion and with the longing to be able to help her relatives. Nothing had seemed too difficult for love to undertake if only they could be rescued and delivered from the tormenting things by which they were enslaved.