h to give it strength. A dark day, he tells you: that the air is
filled with the cry of the slave, and of nations going down into
darkness, their message untold, their work undone: that now, as
eighteen centuries ago, the Helper stands unwelcome in the world; that
your own heart, as well as the great humanity, asks an unrendered
justice. Does he utter all the problems of To-Day? Vandyke, standing
higher, perhaps, or, at any rate, born with hopefuller brain, would
show you how, by the very instant peril of the hour, is lifted clearer
into view the eternal prophecy of coming content: could tell you that
the unquiet earth, and the unanswering heaven are instinct with it:
that the ungranted prayer of your own life should teach it to you: that
in that Book wherein God has not scorned to write the history of
America, he finds the quiet surety that the rescue of the world is near
at hand.

Holmes, like most men who make destiny, does not pause in his cool,
slow work for their prophecy or lamentation. "Such men will mould the
age," old Knowles says, drearily, for he does not like Holmes: follows
him unwillingly, even knowing him nearer the truth than he. "Born for
mastership, as I told you long ago: they strike the blow, while----.
I'm tired of theorists, exponents of the abstract right: your Hamlets,
and your Sewards, that let occasion slip until circumstance or--mobs
drift them as they will."

But Knowles's growls are unheeded, as usual.

What is this To-Day to Margret? She has no prophetic insight, cares
for none, I am afraid: the common things of every-day wear their old
faces to her, dear and real. Her haste is too eager to allay the pain
about her, her husband's touch too strong and tender, the Master beside
her too actual a presence, for her to waste her life in visions.
Something of Lois's live, universal sympathy has come into her narrow,
intenser nature; through its one love, it may be. What is To-Morrow
until it comes? This moment the evening air thrills with a purple of
which no painter as yet has caught the tint, no poet the meaning; no
silent face passes her on the street on which a human voice might not
have charm to call out love and power: the Helper yet waits near her.
Here is work, life: the Old Year you despise holds beauty, pain,
content yet unmastered: let us leave Margret to master them.

It does not satisfy you? Child-souls, you tell me, like that of Lois,
may find it enough to hold no past