Mr. Gray stared at his son silently.  His face grew ashen and the hand upon the table before him trembled visibly.  Hubert stood in an agony of mute sympathy.  At last the father rose without a word and prepared to leave the room.  His face looked older by a decade than an hour before.  Hubert made a movement to detain him and opened his lips to speak; but the other waved him aside with a quick gesture of the trembling hand.  And so they parted.

Hubert looked after his father with a breaking heart.  He had thought the crisis of his grief was passed when alone in his room he wrestled out the problem for his own heart.  But now a heavier weight rested upon his soul.  Must he break his father’s heart?  Must the hope of happy comradeship in future years be put aside, and with the disappointment his father age and weaken irrecoverably?  He saw him walk down the path slowly and heavily, and a feeling of awful guilt swept over him.  Was he his father’s murderer?  Was he following a delusion that would make himself an exile and lay his father prematurely in his grave?  The thought overpowered him.  He sank helplessly in a chair and groaned out his burden to the Lord.

“O Lord,” he prayed, “am I walking in Thy footsteps, or am I a deluded wretch, bringing sorrow, and it may be death, to those I love most?” He paused, and his head sank deeply.  “Lord, this is grief,” he groaned.  “This is grief.  I have not known it before.”

And so it seemed.  Thoughts of his own loneliness and possible hardships seemed light compared with this.

“Grief!” he repeated, as though he found relief in the pitiful uttering of the word whose depths he was sounding.  Then memory framed a passage which held the same word.  “A man of sorrows,” it repeated, “and acquainted with grief!”

How sweet the words sounded!  And how dear the imagined face of Him of whom they were spoken!

“Tell me of Thy grief,” he whispered.  “Didst Thou cause grief?”

Words of Scripture again came to his help.

“Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul,” he heard Simeon say to the mother of his Lord, and it dawned upon him that when Jesus faced the cross with its agony He must have felt through His tenderest of hearts the sword-piercing of His Mother’s sorrow.  Ah, yes!  He caused grief.  And as He took His own way to the cross He raised a standard for those who follow of pitiless separations and of broken ties, if need be, for His kingdom’s sake. “If any man cometh unto Me, and, hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.”

Texts that Hubert had passed lightly before were now illuminated with meaning and power as the occasion rose for them to be translated into life.  He found a rare sweetness of comfort in those which assured him that he need not fear he was out of the path of the Saviour’s footprints, though he found them blood-marked or washed with many tears.  He turned to some familiar words which he wished to see before him again in plain black and white.  They were found toward the end of the ninth chapter of Luke.