Light -- Into Darkness

The wind had died down, the clouds were rolling away the darkness and
the rain had almost stopped as we all stood and waited for Gregory
Goodloe to bring from that ruin, in the way his superior judgment
thought best, either life or death. From within there came sobs and
smothered little moans that were so mingled that they could not be
identified by even the mother hearts held at bay by the faith that made
them obey the parson's command.

And then as I stood there with the mother of the child of my lover
cowering against my breast, with the man who in a few days was to have
been my husband, crouched under almost certain grinding death, and
looked into what at any moment might be the grave of all the babies of
the women I held dear, a light was flooding into my darkness and all of
the obscure, untranslatable writings on my nature became clear and I
received my consciousness of my Master, the Lord Jesus, with a cry that
I sent up for His mediation for the lives of the little ones. It was my
first prayer.

"O Christ in Heaven, help save them!" I pleaded. "Quick, Gregory,
quick!" I added another supplication in the next breath.

"Sue is bleeding, too!" again came a wail in Charlotte's voice. "Mikey's
got the baby, but he's caught."

Nell had been kneeling beside Mark's prostrate form, but at Charlotte's
call she laid his head on Harriet's breast and flung herself against my
arm outstretched to receive and restrain her.