'If ye love me, keep my commandments' — I have
not! I have not! Oh, but I will! I will; and he will be with
me, and help me, and bless me, and all will go right with me."
With bitter tears Ellen mingled as eager prayers for
forgiveness and help to be faithful. She resolved that
nothing, come what would, should tempt her to swerve one iota
from the straight line of truth; she resolved to be more
careful of her private hour; she thought she had scarcely had
her full hour a day lately; she resolved to make the Bible her
only and her constant rule of life in everything: and she
prayed such prayers as a heart thoroughly in earnest can pray,
for the seal to these resolutions. Not one word of the sermon
did Ellen hear; but she never passed a more profitable hour in
church in her life.
_All_ her tears were not from the spring of these thoughts and
feelings; some were the pouring out of gathered sadness of the
week; some came from recollections, oh, how tender and strong!
of lost and distant friends. Her mother, and Alice, and Mr.
Humphreys, and Margery, and Mr. Van Brunt, and Mr. George
Marshman; and she longed, with longing that seemed as if it
would have burst her heart, to see her brother. She longed for
the pleasant voice, the eye of thousand expressions, into
which she always looked as if she had never seen it before,
the calm look that told he was satisfied with her, the touch
of his hand, which many a time had said a volume.
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