Hannah hesitated, but Ralph pressed the question with eagerness.

“I saw you cross that blue-grass pasture the night—­the night that you walked home with me.”  She would have said the night of the robbery, but her heart smote her, and she adopted the more kindly form of the sentence.

Ralph would have explained, but how?

“I did cross the pasture,” he began, “but—­”

Just here it occurred to Ralph that there was no reason for his night excursion across the pasture.  Hannah again took up her bucket, but he said: 

“Tell me what else you have against me.”

“I haven’t anything against you.  Only I am poor and friendless, and you oughtn’t to make my life any heavier.  They say that you have paid attention to a great many girls.  I don’t know why you should want to trifle with me.”

Ralph answered her this time.  He spoke low.  He spoke as though he were speaking to God.  “If any man says that I ever trifled with any woman, he lies.  I have never loved but one, and you know who that is.  And God knows.”

“I don’t know what to say, Mr. Hartsook.”  Hannah’s voice was broken.  These solemn words of love were like a river in the desert, and she was like a wanderer dying of thirst.  “I don’t know, Mr. Hartsook.  If I was alone, it wouldn’t matter.  But I’ve got my blind mother and my poor Shocky to look after.  And I don’t want to make mistakes.  And the world is so full of lies I don’t know what to believe.  Somehow I can’t help believing what you say.  You seem to speak so true.  But—­”

“But what?” said Ralph.

“But you know how I saw you just as kind to Martha Hawkins on Sunday as—­as—­”

“Han—­ner!” It was the melodious voice of the angry Mrs. Means, and Hannah lifted her pail and disappeared.

Standing in the shadow of his own despair, Ralph felt how dark a night could be when it had no promise of morning.

And Dr. Small, who had been stabling his horse just inside the barn, came out and moved quietly into the house just as though he had not listened intently to every word of the conversation.

As Ralph walked away he tried to comfort himself by calling to his aid the bulldog in his character.  But somehow it did not do him any good.  For what is a bulldog but a stoic philosopher?  Stoicism has its value, but Ralph had come to a place where stoicism was of no account.  The memory of the Helper, of his sorrow, his brave and victorious endurance, came when stoicism failed.  Happiness might go out of life, but in the light of Christ’s life happiness seemed but a small element anyhow.  The love of woman might be denied him, but there still remained what was infinitely more precious and holy, the love of God.  There still remained the possibility of heroic living.  Working, suffering, and enduring still remained.  And he who can work for God and endure for God, surely has yet the best of life left.  And, like the knights who could find the Holy Grail only in losing themselves, Hartsook, in throwing his happiness out of the count, found the purest happiness, a sense of the victory of the soul over the tribulations of life.  The man who knows this victory scarcely needs the encouragement of the hope of future happiness.  There is a real heaven in bravely lifting the load of one’s own sorrow and work.