The Maid of Maiden Lane

"But it is not possible this can content you. You must have some other hope and desire, Annie?"

"Perhaps I once had--and to-day is a good time to speak of it to you, because now it troubles me no longer. You know what my father desired, and what your father promised, for us both?"

"Yes. Did you desire it, Annie?"

"I do not desire it now. You were ever against it?"

"Oh Annie!--"

"It makes no matter, George. I shall never marry you."

"Do you dislike me so much?"

"I am very fond of you. You are of my race and my kindred, and I love every soul of the Hydes that has ever tarried on this earth."

"Well then?"

"I shall marry no one. I will show you the better way. Few can walk in it, but Doctor Roslyn says, he thinks it may be my part--my happy part-- to do so:" and as she spoke she took from the little pocket at her side a small copy of the gospels, and it opened of its own account at the twentieth chapter of St. Luke. "See!" she said, "and read it for yourself, George--"

"The children of this world marry and are given in marriage. But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage.

"Neither can they die any more; for they are equal unto the angels, and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection." [Footnote: St. Luke, chap. xx. 34-36.] "To die no more! To be like unto the angels! To be the children of God! This is the end and aim of my desires, to be among 'the children of God!'"

"Dear Annie, I cannot understand this."

"Not yet. It is not your time. My soul, I think, is ages older than yours. It takes ages of schooling to get into that class that may leave Earth forever, and be as the angels. Even now I know, I am sure that you are fretting and miserable for the love of some woman. For whose love, George? Tell me."

Then Hyde plunged with headlong precipitancy into the story of his love for Cornelia, and of the inexplicably cruel way in which it had been brought to a close. "And yesterday," he continued with a sob in his voice--"yesterday I heard that her father had taken her to Philadelphia. I shall see her no more. He will marry her to Rem Van Arenas, or to one of her Quaker cousins, and the taste is taken out of my life, and I am only a walking misery."