itself in the dark, with a pang in
his heart for the solitude which awaited the old man under his own roof.
He ran swiftly over their argument in his mind, and questioned himself
whether he had used him with unfailing tenderness, whether he had let
him think that he regarded him as at all reprobate and culpable. He gave
up the quest as he rejoined his wife with a long, unconscious sigh that
made her lift her head.

"What is it, Clarence?"

"Nothing"--

"You look perfectly exhausted. You look worried. Was it something you
were talking about?"

Then he told her, and he had trouble to keep her resentment in bounds.
She held that, as a minister, he ought to have rebuked the wretched
creature; that it was nothing short of offensive to him for Hilbrook to
take such a position. She said his face was all flushed, and that she
knew he would not sleep, and she should get him a glass of warm milk;
the fire was out in the stove, but she could heat it over the lamp in a
tin cup.

VI.

Hilbrook did not come again till Ewbert had been to see him; and in the
meantime the minister suffered from the fear that the old man was
staying away because of some hurt which he had received in their
controversy. Hilbrook came to church as before, and blinked at him
through the two sermons which Ewbert preached on significant texts, and
the minister hoped he was listening with a sense of personal appeal in
them. He had not only sought to make them convincing as to the doctrine
of another life, but he had dealt in terms of loving entreaty with those
who had not the precious faith of this in their hearts, and he had
wished to convey to Hilbrook an assurance of peculiar sympathy.

The day following the last of his sermons, Ewbert had to officiate at
the funeral of a little child whose mother had been stricken to the
earth by her bereavement. The hapless creature had sent for him again
and again, and had clung about his very soul, beseeching him for
assurance that she should see her child hereafter, and have it hers,
just as it was, forever, he had not had the heart to refuse her this
consolation, and he had pushed himself, in giving it, beyond the bounds
of imagination. When she confessed her own inability to see how it could
be, and yet demanded of him that it should be, he answered her that our
inability to realize the fact had nothing to do with its reality. In the
few words he said over the little one, at the last, he recurred to this
p