Juliet shuddered.  Dorothy’s father not two months gone and the dreadful little man to talk to her like that!

“Do you then think,” said Dorothy, “that the dead only seem to have gone from us?” and her eyes looked like store-houses of holy questions.

“I know so little,” he answered, “that I dare hardly say I think any thing.  But if, as our Lord implies, there be no such thing as that which the change appears to us—­nothing like that we are thinking of when we call it death—­may it not be that, obstinate as is the appearance of separation, there is, notwithstanding, none of it?—­I don’t care, mind:  His will is, and that is every thing.  But there can be no harm, where I do not know His will, in venturing a may be.  I am sure He likes His little ones to tell their fancies in the dimmits about the nursery fire.  Our souls yearning after light of any sort must be a pleasure to him to watch.—­But on the other hand, to resume the subject, it may be that, as it is good for us to miss them in the body that we may the better find them in the spirit, so it may be good for them also to miss our bodies that they may find our spirits.”

“But,” suggested Ruth, “they had that kind of discipline while yet on earth, in the death of those who went before them; and so another sort might be better for them now.  Might it not be more of a discipline for them to see, in those left behind, how they themselves, from lack of faith, went groping about in the dark, while crowds all about them knew perfectly what they could not bring themselves to believe?”

“It might, Ruth, it might; nor do I think any thing to the contrary.  Or it might be given to some and not to others, just as it was good for them.  It may be that some can see some, or can see them sometimes, and watch their ways in partial glimpses of revelation.  Who knows who may be about the house when all its mortals are dead for the night, and the last of the fires are burning unheeded!  There are so many hours of both day and night—­in most houses—­in which those in and those out of the body need never cross each others’ paths!  And there are tales, legends, reports, many mere fiction doubtless, but some possibly of a different character, which represent this and that doer of evil as compelled, either by the law of his or her own troubled being, or by some law external thereto, ever, or at fixed intervals, to haunt the moldering scenes of their past, and ever dream horribly afresh the deeds done in the body.  These, however, tend to no proof of what we have been speaking about, for such ‘extravagant and erring spirit’ does not haunt the living from love, but the dead from suffering.  In this life, however, few of us come really near to each other in the genuine simplicity of love, and that may be the reason why the credible stories of love meeting love across the strange difference are so few.  It is a wonderful touch, I always think, in the play