a dog "called her nearest and best."

Let us be silent; the story of the night is not for us to read. Do you
think that He, who in the far, dim Life holds the worlds in His hand,
knew or cared how alone the child was? What if she wrung her thin
hands, grew sick with the slow, mad, solitary tears?--was not the world
to save, as Knowles said?

He, too, had been alone; He had come unto His own, and His own received
him not: so, while the struggling world rested, unconscious, in
infinite calm of right, He came close to her with human eyes that had
loved, and not been loved, and had suffered with that pain. And,
trusting Him, she only said, "Show me my work! Thou that takest away
the pain of the world, have mercy upon me!"

CHAPTER VII.

For that night, at least, Holmes swept his soul clean of doubt and
indecision; one of his natures was conquered,--finally, he thought.
Polston, if he had seen his face as he paced the street slowly home to
the mill, would have remembered his mother's the day she died. How the
stern old woman met death half-way! why should she fear? she was as
strong as he. Wherein had she failed of duty? her hands were clean:
she was going to meet her just reward.

It was different with Holmes, of course, with his self-existent soul.
It was life he accepted to-night, he thought,--a life of growth,
labour, achievement,--eternal.

"Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast,"--favourite words with him. He liked to
study the nature of the man who spoke them; because, I think, it was
like his own,--a Titan strength of endurance, an infinite capability of
love, and hate, and suffering, and over all, (the peculiar identity of
the man,) a cold, speculative eye of reason, that looked down into the
passion and depths of his growing self, and calmly noted them, a lesson
for all time.

"Ohne Hast." Going slowly through the night, he strengthened himself by
marking how all things in Nature accomplish a perfected life through
slow, narrow fixedness of purpose,--each life complete in itself: why
not his own, then? The windless gray, the stars, the stone under his
feet, stood alone in the universe, each working out its own soul into
deed. If there were any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all,
he did not see it. Knowles--that old sceptic--believed in it, and
called it Love. Even Goethe himself, what was it he said? "Der
Allumfasser, der Allerhalter, fasst und erhalt er nicht, dich, mich,
sich selbst?"

Th