For Margaret, kissing her good-night, had laid her head down a minute on her breast.  She stroked the hair a moment, and then turned away.

“Mother, could you stay with me to-night?”

“Why, no, Maggie,—­your father wants me to read to him.”

“Oh, I know.  Did he miss me to-night,—­father?”

“Not much; we were talking old times over,—­in Virginia, you know.”

“I know; good-night.”

She went back to the chair.  Tige was there,—­for he used to spend half of his time on the farm.  She put her arm about his head.  God knows how lonely the poor child was when she drew the dog so warmly to her heart:  not for his master’s sake alone; but it was all she had.  He grew tired at last, and whined, trying to get out.

“Will you go, Tige?” she said, and opened the window.

He jumped out, and she watched him going towards town.  Such a little thing, it was!  But not even a dog “called her nearest and best.”

Let us be silent; the story of the night is not for us to read.  Do you think that He, who in the far, dim Life holds the worlds in His hand, knew or cared how alone the child was?  What if she wrung her thin hands, grew sick with the slow, mad, solitary tears?—­was not the world to save, as Knowles said?

He, too, had been alone; He had come unto His own, and His own received him not:  so, while the struggling world rested, unconscious, in infinite calm of right, He came close to her with human eyes that had loved, and not been loved, and had suffered with that pain.  And, trusting Him, she only said, “Show me my work!  Thou that takest away the pain of the world, have mercy upon me!”

For that night, at least, Holmes swept his soul clean of doubt and indecision; one of his natures was conquered,—­finally, he thought.  Polston, if he had seen his face as he paced the street slowly home to the mill, would have remembered his mother’s the day she died.  How the stern old woman met death half-way! why should she fear? she was as strong as he.  Wherein had she failed of duty? her hands were clean:  she was going to meet her just reward.

It was different with Holmes, of course, with his self-existent soul.  It was life he accepted to-night, he thought,—­a life of growth, labor, achievement,—­eternal.

“Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast,”—­favorite words with him.  He liked to study the nature of the man who spoke them; because, I think, it was like his own,—­a Titan strength of endurance, an infinite capability of love and hate and suffering, and over all (the peculiar identity of the man) a cold, speculative eye of reason, that looked down into the passion and depths of his growing self, and calmly noted them, a lesson for all time.