, the boy made a great stride towards manhood. Doubtless his
mother's grief had been the same as grannie's--the fear that she would
lose her husband for ever. The hourly fresh griefs from neglect and
wrong did not occur to him; only the never never more. He looked no
farther, took the portrait from his neck and replaced it with the paper,
put the box back, and walled it up in solitude once more with the dusty
bundles. Then he went down to his grandmother, sadder and more desolate
than ever.

He found her seated in her usual place. Her New Testament, a large-print
octavo, lay on the table beside her unopened; for where within those
boards could she find comfort for a grief like hers? That it was the
will of God might well comfort any suffering of her own, but would it
comfort Andrew? and if there was no comfort for Andrew, how was Andrew's
mother to be comforted?

Yet God had given his first-born to save his brethren: how could he be
pleased that she should dry her tears and be comforted? True, some awful
unknown force of a necessity with which God could not cope came in to
explain it; but this did not make God more kind, for he knew it all
every time he made a man; nor man less sorrowful, for God would have his
very mother forget him, or, worse still, remember him and be happy.

'Read a chapter till me, laddie,' she said.

Robert opened and read till he came to the words: 'I pray not for the
world.'

'He was o' the world,' said the old woman; 'and gin Christ wadna pray
for him, what for suld I?'

Already, so soon after her son's death, would her theology begin to
harden her heart. The strife which results from believing that the
higher love demands the suppression of the lower, is the most fearful of
all discords, the absolute love slaying love--the house divided against
itself; one moment all given up for the will of Him, the next the human
tenderness rushing back in a flood. Mrs. Falconer burst into a very
agony of weeping. From that day, for many years, the name of her
lost Andrew never passed her lips in the hearing of her grandson, and
certainly in that of no one else.

But in a few weeks she was more cheerful. It is one of the mysteries of
humanity that mothers in her circumstances, and holding her creed, do
regain not merely the faculty of going on with the business of life,
but, in most cases, even cheerfulness. The infinite Truth, the Love of
the universe, supports them beyond their consciousness, comin