and slept ill—­and the waking hours of the night were hours of torture.  He was out of health, and he knew it, but that did not comfort him.  It was wrong and its misery that had made him ill, not illness that had made him miserable.  Was he a weakling, a fool not to let the past be the past?  “Things without all remedy should be without regard:  what’s done is done.”  But not every strong man who has buried his murdered in his own garden, and set up no stone over them, can forget where they lie.  It needs something that is not strength to be capable of that.  The dead alone can bury their dead so; and there is a bemoaning that may help to raise the dead.  But sometimes such dead come alive unbemoaned.  Oblivion is not a tomb strong enough to keep them down.  The time may come when a man will find his past but a cenotaph, and its dead all walking and making his present night hideous.  And when such dead walk so, it is a poor chance they do not turn out vampires.

When she had buried her dead out of her sight, Dorothy sought solitude and the things unseen more than ever.  The Wingfolds were like swallows about her, never folding their wings of ministry, but not haunting her with bodily visitation.  She never refused to see them, but they understood:  the hour was not yet when their presence would be a comfort to her.  The only comfort the heart can take must come—­not from, but through itself.  Day after day she would go into the park, avoiding the lodge, and there brood on the memories of her father and his late words.  And ere long she began to feel nearer to him than she had ever felt while he was with her.  For, where the outward sign has been understood, the withdrawing of it will bring the inward fact yet nearer.  When our Lord said the spirit of Himself would come to them after He was gone, He but promised the working of one of the laws of His Father’s kingdom:  it was about to operate in loftiest grade.

Most people find the first of a bereavement more tolerable than what follows.  They find in its fever a support.  When the wound in the earth is closed, and the wave of life has again rushed over it, when things have returned to their wonted, now desiccated show, then the very Sahara of desolation opens around them, and for a time existence seems almost insupportable.  With Dorothy it was different.  Alive in herself, she was hungering and thirsting after life, therefore death could not have dominion over her.

To her surprise she found also—­she could not tell how the illumination had come—­she wondered even how it should ever have been absent—­that, since her father’s death, many of her difficulties had vanished.  Some of them, remembering there had been such, she could hardly recall sufficiently to recognize them.  She had been lifted into a region above that wherein moved the questions which had then disturbed her peace.  From a point of clear vision, she saw the things themselves so different, that those questions were no longer relevant.