“Yes, cruel enough, my dear,” March owned to his wife, when they talked the matter over on his return home.  He could not wait till the children were out of the way, and afterward neither he nor his wife was sorry that he had spoken of it before them.  The girl cried plentifully for her old friend who was dead, and said she hated Mr. Dryfoos, and then was sorry for him, too; and the boy listened to all, and spoke with a serious sense that pleased his father.  “But as to how he took it,” March went on to answer his wife’s question about Dryfoos—­“how do any of us take a thing that hurts?  Some of us cry out, and some of us don’t.  Dryfoos drew a kind of long, quivering breath, as a child does when it grieves—­there’s something curiously simple and primitive about him—­and didn’t say anything.  After a while he asked me how he could see the people at the hospital about the remains; I gave him my card to the young doctor there that had charge of Lindau.  I suppose he was still carrying forward his plan of reparation in his mind—­to the dead for the dead.  But how useless!  If he could have taken the living Lindau home with him, and cared for him all his days, what would it have profited the gentle creature whose life his worldly ambition vexed and thwarted here?  He might as well offer a sacrifice at Conrad’s grave.  Children,” said March, turning to them, “death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach.  Remember that, and be good to every one here on earth, for your longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to the dead will be the very ecstasy of anguish to you.  I wonder,” he mused, “if one of the reasons why we’re shut up to our ignorance of what is to be hereafter isn’t because if we were sure of another world we might be still more brutal to one another here, in the hope of making reparation somewhere else.  Perhaps, if we ever come to obey the law of love on earth, the mystery of death will be taken away.”

“Well”—­the ancestral Puritanism spoke in Mrs. March—­“these two old men have been terribly punished.  They have both been violent and wilful, and they have both been punished.  No one need ever tell me there is not a moral government of the universe!”

March always disliked to hear her talk in this way, which did both her head and heart injustice.  “And Conrad,” he said, “what was he punished for?”

“He?”—­she answered, in an exaltation—­“he suffered for the sins of others.”

“Ah, well, if you put it in that way, yes.  That goes on continually.  That’s another mystery.”

He fell to brooding on it, and presently he heard his son saying, “I suppose, papa, that Mr. Lindau died in a bad cause?”

March was startled.  He had always been so sorry for Lindau, and admired his courage and generosity so much, that he had never fairly considered this question.  “Why, yes,” he answered; “he died in the cause of disorder; he was trying to obstruct the law.  No doubt there was a wrong there, an inconsistency and an injustice that he felt keenly; but it could not be reached in his way without greater wrong.”