MR. A. That away from the whirl you will find your way to peace.

C. I don’t see how.  Quiet only makes me more miserable.

MR. A. My poor child, if you can speak out and tell me exactly how it is with you, I think it might be comfortable to you.  If it is the missing your mother, and blaming yourself for having allowed her to overdo herself, I may well share with you in that.  I feel most grievously that I never perceived how much she was undertaking, nor how she flagged under it.  Unselfish people want others to think for them, and I did not.

C. Dear grandpapa, it would not have been too much if I had come and helped.  I know that; but it is not the worst.  You can’t feel as I do—­that if my desertion led to her overworking herself, Aunt Phrasie and Lucius say that what really broke her down was the opinions I cannot help having.  Say it was not, grandpapa.

MR. A. I wish I could, my dear; but I cannot conceal that unhappiness about you, and regret for having let you expose yourself to those unfortunate arguments, broke her spirits so that her energies were unequal to the strain that I allowed to be laid on her.

C. Poor dear mother!  And you and she can feel in that way about the importance of what to me seems—­pardon me, grandpapa—­utterly unproved.

MR. A. You hold everything unproved that you cannot work out like a mathematical demonstration.

C. I can’t help it, grandpapa.  I read and read, till all the premises become lost in the cloud of myths that belong to all nations.  I don’t want to think such things.  I saw dear mother rest on her belief, and grow peaceful.  They were perfect realities to her; but I cannot unthink.  I would give anything to think that she is in perfect happiness now, and that we shall meet again; but nothing seems certain to me.  All is extinguished.

MR. A. How do you mean?

C. They—­Betty and her set, I mean—­laughed at and argued one thing after another, till they showed me that there were no positive grounds to go on.

MR. A. No material grounds.

C. And what else is certain?

MR. A. Do you think your mother was not certain?

C. I saw she was; I see you are certain.  But what am I to do?  I cannot unthink.

MR. A. Poor child, they have loosed you from the shore, because you could not see it, and left you to flounder in the waves.

C. Well, so I feel it sometimes; but if I could only feel that there was a shore, I would try to get my foothold.  Oh, with all my heart!

MR. A. Will you take my word, dear child—­the word of one who can dare humbly to say he has proved it, so as to be as sure as of the floor we are standing on, that that Rock exists; and God grant that you may, in prayer and patience, be brought to rest on it once more.

C. Once more!  I don’t think I ever did so really.  I only did not think, and kept away from what was dull and tiresome.  Didn’t you read something about ‘If thou hadst known—­’