“Suppose the latter feels that in joining hands both would stumble?”

“You would not, oh, Edna! you would lift each other to noble heights!  Each life would be perfect, complete.  My child, will you let me tell you some things that ought to—­”

She threw up her hand, with that old, childish gesture which he remembered so well, and shook her head.

“No, sir; no, sir!  Please tell me nothing that will rouse a sorrow I am striving to drug.  Spare me, for as St. Chrysostom once said of Olympias the deaconess, I ‘live in perpetual fellowship with pain.’”

“My dear little Edna, as I look at you and think of your future, I am troubled about you.  I wish I could confidently say to you, what that same St. Chrysostom wrote to Pentadia:  ’For I know your great and lofty soul, which can sail as with a fair wind through many tempests, and in the midst of the waves enjoy A white calm.’”

She turned and took the minister’s hand in hers, while an indescribable peace settled on her countenance, and stilled the trembling of her low, sweet voice: 

“Across the gray stormy billows of life, that ‘white calm’ of eternity is rimming the water-line, coming to meet me.  Already the black pilot-boat heaves in sight; I hear the signal, and Death will soon take the helm and steer my little bark safely into the shining rest, into God’s ‘white calm.’”

She went to the piano and sang, as a solo, “Night’s Shade no Longer,” from Moses in Egypt.

While the pastor listened, he murmured to himself: 

  “Sublime is the faith of a lonely soul,
    In pain and trouble cherished;
   Sublime is the spirit of hope that lives
    When earthly hope has perished.”

She turned over the sheets of music, hunting for a German hymn of which Mr. Hammond was very fond, but he called her back to the fireplace.

“My dear, do you recollect that beautiful passage in Faber’s ’Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches’?  ’There is seldom a line of glory written upon the earth’s face but a line of suffering runs parallel with it; and they that read the lustrous syllables of the one, and stoop not to decipher the spotted and worn inscription of the other, get the least half of the lesson earth has to give.’”

“No, sir; I never read the book.  Something in that passage brings to my mind those words of Martin Luther’s, which explain so many of the ‘spotted inscriptions’ of this earth:  ’Our Lord God doth like a printer, who setteth the letters backward.  We see and feel well His setting, but we shall read the print yonder, in the life to come!’ Mr. Hammond, it is said that, in the Alexandrian Ms, in the British Museum, there is a word which has been subjected to microscopic examination, to determine whether it is oe, who, or thC—­which is the abbreviation of theoz, God Sometimes I think that so ought we to turn the lens of faith on many dim, perplexing inscriptions traced in human history, and perhaps we might oftener find God.”