Hubert answered gently.

"I believe I am, father," he said.

Mr. Gray stared at his son silently. His face grew ashen and the hand
upon the table before him trembled visibly. Hubert stood in an agony
of mute sympathy. At last the father rose without a word and prepared
to leave the room. His face looked older by a decade than an hour
before. Hubert made a movement to detain him and opened his lips to
speak; but the other waved him aside with a quick gesture of the
trembling hand. And so they parted.

Hubert looked after his father with a breaking heart. He had thought
the crisis of his grief was passed when alone in his room he wrestled
out the problem for his own heart. But now a heavier weight rested
upon his soul. Must he break his father's heart? Must the hope of
happy comradeship in future years be put aside, and with the
disappointment his father age and weaken irrecoverably? He saw him
walk down the path slowly and heavily, and a feeling of awful guilt
swept over him. Was he his father's murderer? Was he following a
delusion that would make himself an exile and lay his father
prematurely in his grave? The thought overpowered him. He sank
helplessly in a chair and groaned out his burden to the Lord.

"O Lord," he prayed, "am I walking in Thy footsteps, or am I a deluded
wretch, bringing sorrow, and it may be death, to those I love most?"
He paused, and his head sank deeply. "Lord, this is grief," he
groaned. "This is grief. I have not known it before."

And so it seemed. Thoughts of his own loneliness and possible
hardships seemed light compared with this.

"Grief!" he repeated, as though he found relief in the pitiful uttering
of the word whose depths he was sounding. Then memory framed a passage
which held the same word. "A man of sorrows," it repeated, "and
_acquainted with grief_!"

How sweet the words sounded! And how dear the imagined face of Him of
whom they were spoken!

"Tell me of Thy grief," he whispered. "Didst Thou cause grief?"

Words of Scripture again came to his help.

"Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul," he heard Simeon say
to the mother of his Lord, and it dawned upon him that when Jesus faced
the cross with its agony He must have felt through His tenderest of
hearts the sword-piercing of His Mother's sorrow. Ah, yes! He caused
grief. And as He took His own way to the cross He raised a standard
for those who follow of pitiless separations and