ished aloud, as her mother had done in her own mind. She never
knew that Uncle Oldways was "pious."

"Never knew that was what it meant? What else can it mean? What do
you suppose the resurrection was, or is?"

Desire answered with a yet larger look of wonder, only in the dim
light it could not be wholly seen.

"The raising up of the dead; Christ coming up out of the tomb."

"The coming out of the tomb was a small part of it; just what could
not help being, if the rest was. Jesus Christ rose out of dead
_things_, I take it, into these very real ones that we are talking
of, and so lived in them. The resurrection is a man's soul coming
alive to the soul of creation--God's soul. _That_ is eternal life,
and what Jesus of Nazareth was born to show. Our coming to that is
our being 'raised with Him;' and it begins, or ought to, a long way
this side the tomb. If people would only read the New Testament,
expecting to get as much common sense and earnest there as they do
among the new lights and little 'progressive-thinkers' that are
trying to find it all out over again, they might spare these
gentlemen and themselves a great deal of their trouble."

The exclamation rose half-way to her lips again,--"I never knew you
thought like this. I never heard you talk of these things before!"

But she held it back, because she would not stop him by reminding
him that he _was_ talking. It was just the truth that was saying
itself. She must let it say on, while it would.

"Un--"

She stopped there, at the first syllable. She would not even call
him "Uncle Titus" again, for fear of recalling him to himself, and
hushing him up.

"There is something--isn't there--about those who _attain_ to that
resurrection; those who are _worthy_? I suppose there must be some
who are just born to this world, then, and never--'born again?'"

"It looks like it, sometimes; who can tell?"

"Uncle Oldways,"--it came out this time in her earnestness, and her
strong personal appeal,--"do you think there are some people--whole
families of people--who have no business in the reality of things
to be at all? Who are all a mistake in the world, and have nothing
to do with its meaning? I have got to feeling sometimes lately, as
if--_I_--had never had any business to be."

She spoke slowly--awe-fully. It was a strange speech for a girl in
her nineteenth year. But she was a girl in this nineteenth century,
also; and she had caught some of the thoughts and que