l. I throw my arms about
them and hold them fast. Perhaps even they must be withdrawn. Perhaps
it is a part of my service to lose my way. Even that I accept. I reach
my hand for the cup--thirstily. I drink, and to the Unknown God. What
is He? I am contented not to know. What am I? It is His will I should
not know. Only this: the soul is perfect, indestructible, and she goes
to lave herself in Him.

* * * * *

The next morning, said Pierre, Francis made swift preparations for
going away. They were few, for he wished to retain nothing belonging to
his former life. He took last long looks about the walls, he studied
the pictures as if he would learn them by heart, and laid his hand upon
one and another of the things that had been dear to him. Then he
touched fire to the building, and stood by outside, waiting while it
burned. Pierre very plainly understood why he did it, though he could
not tell. He seemed to distrust the quality of my intelligence because
I asked primitive questions. Was it because Francis feared marauders?
Was it some idea of sacrifice to his father's memory? Was it because he
felt himself unworthy to retain the precious surroundings of a life to
which he had been false? As I became insistent, Pierre grew dumb. The
cabin burned, he said. Francis watched it. Then he went away. He never
came back.

In the old man's countenance I fancied I could trace, under a veiling
patience, the lines of an immortal grief. Francis, I could understand,
had been the child of his heart, his one human love. It had taken all
the great austerity of the forest to teach him to bear that loss. Yet
you could see from his face, as in the faces of so many who suffer with
dignity, that he was not destitute of hope.

It has been surprisingly difficult to follow the after-track of Francis
Hume. For those who knew him have only to say that he disappeared. But
he disappeared merely by settling down at their own door: the back-door
where carriages never come. He selected a very poor and sordid street
in the city where he had met his loss, and betook himself there to
live; not, I believe, with any idea of work among the poor, but because
he had probed life to the bottom in his own experience, and he felt
constrained to seek a lower depth. He had acquired that passionate
abnegation which is the child of grief; not undervaluing the joys of
time, he had learned that they were not for him. Now his life bec