We Two. Lyall Edna

looking the same as ever, and there was Aunt Jean coming forward to meet them, with a strange new tenderness in her voice and look, and there was Tom in the background, seeming half shy and afraid to meet her in her grief, and there, above all, was the one great eternal void.

      To watch beside the dying must be anguish, and yet surely not such keen anguish as to have missed the last moments, the last farewells, the last chance of serving. For those who have to come back to the empty house, the home which never can be home again, may God comfort them—no one else can.

      Stillness, and food, and brief snatches of sleep somewhat restored

      Erica. Late in the afternoon she was strong enough to go into her

      mother's room, for that last look so inexpressibly painful to all, so

      entirely void of hope or comfort to those who believe in no hereafter.

      Not even the peacefulness of death was there to give even a slight, a

      momentary relief to her pain; she scarcely even recognized her mother.

      Was that, indeed, all that was left? That pale, rigid, utterly changed

      face and form? Was that her mother? Could that once have been her

      mother? Very often had she heard this great change wrought by death

      referred to in discussions; she knew well the arguments which were

      brought forward by the believers in immortality, the counter arguments

      with which her father invariably met them, and which had always seemed

      to her conclusive. But somehow that which seemed satisfactory in the

      lecture hall did not answer in the room of death. Her whole being seemed

      to flow out into one longing question: Might there not be a Beyond—an

      Unseen? Was this world indeed only

       “A place to stand and love in for an hour,

       With darkness and the death-hour rounding it?”

      She had slept in the afternoon, but at night, when all was still, she could not sleep. The question still lurked in her mind; her sorrow and loneliness grew almost unbearable. She thought if she could only make herself cry again perhaps she might sleep, and she took down a book about Giordano Bruno, and read the account of his martyrdom, an account which always moved her very much. But tonight not even the description of the valiant unshrinking martyr of Free-thought ascending the scaffold to meet his doom could in the slightest degree affect her. She tried another book, this time Dickens's “Tale of Two Cities.” She had never read the last two chapters without feeling a great desire to cry, but tonight she read with perfect unconcern of Sydney Carton's wanderings through Paris on the night before he gave himself up—read the last marvelously written scene without the slightest emotion. It was evidently no use to try anything else; she shut the book, put out her candle, and once more lay down in the dark.

      Then she began to think of the words which had so persistently haunted Sydney Carton: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” She, too, seemed to be wandering about the Parisian streets, hearing these words over and over again. She knew that it was Jesus of Nazareth who had said this. What an assertion it was for a man to make! It was not even “I BRING the resurrection,” or “I GIVE the resurrection,” but “I AM the Resurrection.” And yet, according to her father, his humility had been excessive, carried almost to a fault. Was he the most inconsistent man that ever lived, or what was he? At last she thought she would get up and see whether there was any qualifying context, and when and where he had uttered this tremendous saying.

      Lighting her candle, she crept, a little shivering, white-robed figure, round the book-lined room, scanning the titles on every shelf, but bibles were too much in use in that house to be relegated to the attics, she found only the least interesting and least serviceable of her father's books. There was nothing for it but to go down to the study; so wrapping herself up, for it was a freezing winter's night, she went noiselessly downstairs, and soon found every possible facility for Biblical research.

      A little baffled and even disappointed to find the words in that which she regarded as the least authentic of the gospels, she still resolved to read the account; she read it, indeed, in two or three translations, and compared each closely with the others, but in all the words stood out in uncompromising greatness of assertion. This man claimed to BE the resurrection, of as Wyclif had it, “the agen risying and lyf.”

      And then poor Erica read on to the end of the story and was quite thrown back upon herself by the account of the miracle which followed. It was a beautiful story, she said to herself, poetically written, graphically described, but as to believing it to be true, she could as soon have accepted the “Midsummer Night's Dream” as having actually taken place.

      Shivering with cold she put the books back on their shelf, and stole upstairs once more to bear her comfortless sorrow as best she could.

CHAPTER VIII. “Why Do You Believe It?”

       Table of Contents

      Then the round of weary duties, cold and formal, came to

       meet her, With the life within departed that had given them

       each a soul; And her sick heart even slighted gentle words

       that came to greet her, For grief spread its shadowy pinions

       like a blight upon the whole. A. A. Proctor

      The winter sunshine which glanced in a side-long, half-and-half way into Persecution Alley, and struggled in at the closed blinds of Erica's little attic, streamed unchecked into a far more cheerful room in Guilford Square, and illumined a breakfast table, at which was seated one occupant only, apparently making a late and rather hasty meal. He was a man of about eight-and-twenty, and though he was not absolutely good-looking, his face was one which people turned to look at again, not so much because it was in any way striking as far as features went, but because of an unusual luminousness which pervaded it. The eyes, which were dark gray, were peculiarly expressive, and their softness, which might to some have seemed a trifle unmasculine, was counterbalanced by the straight, dark, noticeable eyebrows, as well as by a thoroughly manly bearing and a general impression of unfailing energy which characterized the whole man. His hair, short beard, and mustache were of a deep nut-brown. He was of medium height and very muscular looking.

      On the whole it was as pleasant a face as you would often meet with, and it was not to be wondered at that his old grandmother looked up pretty frequently from her arm chair by the fire, and watched him with that beautiful loving pride which in the aged never seems exaggerated and very rarely misplaced.

      “You were out very late, were you not, Brian?” she observed, letting her knitting needles rest for a minute, and scrutinizing the rather weary-looking man.

      “Till half-past five this morning,” he replied, in a somewhat preoccupied voice.

      There was a sad look in his eyes, too, which his grandmother partly understood. She knitted another round of her sock and then said:

      “Have you seen Tom Craigie yet?”

      “Yes, last night I came across him,” replied Brian. “He told me she had come home. They traveled by night and got in early yesterday morning.”

      “Poor little thing!” sighed old Mrs. Osmond. “What a home-coming it must have been?”

      “Grannie,” said Brian, pushing back his chair and drawing nearer to the fire “I want you to tell me what I ought to do. I have a message to her from her mother, there was no one else to take it, you know, except the landlady, and I suppose she did not like that. I want to know when I might see her; one has no right to keep it back, and yet how am I to know whether she is fit to bear it? I can't write it down, it won't somehow go on to paper, yet I can hardly ask to see her.”