out together in other days, I doing all the
talking, and he no less silent than usual there in his holy grave. We
had never quarreled as man and wife, because he would not do his part
of the contending. I untied my bonnet strings, took it off and laid it
on the grass, sat down by his headstone and cried--not so much for him
as for fear he would not understand. He never had.

[Illustration: Not So Much for Him as for Fear He Would Not Understand.]

William's greatest limitation as a minister was his firm conviction
that the world was a drawback to Heaven. He fought it and abused it to
the last, as if God had not made it and designed it to furnish
properly-chastened material for His higher Kingdom. And somehow, as I
wept and talked down to him in his dust I felt wonderfully like the
young woman that had loved him and feared him during those first
rebellious years when I was still so much the Episcopalian and so
little the Methodist.

The next day I sent a letter to my sister Sarah, a widow living with
her two grown daughters in New York. For years I had kept up no
relations with my own family. They were of the world, prosperous, and
I felt that they could not understand William nor the soul-steepling
way we lived. But now I was writing to accept the invitation Sarah
sent me just after William's death, to make my home with her.

A week later I packed my things, borrowed my church letter, locked my
door and took the train at Royden for New York. I told the neighbors I
was going for a visit to New York, but really I was on my way to find
the world again. And I found it. You cannot find anything else in New
York.

Sarah and the girls met me at the Grand Central Station and they spent
more kisses welcoming me than I had received since my bridal days.
Sarah is two years older than I am, but she looks ten years younger,
and there is not the mark of a prayer on her smooth face, while I feel
as if I might have the doxology stamped in wrinkles above my eyebrows.

Everything is different from the way it is at home. We do not have
dinner till supper-time, and there is no mantel or fireplace in my
room, although the furniture is grander than anything I ever saw. I
set William's photograph on the dresser, and I can tell by the way he
looks at me all day long that he would not approve of the way I am
carrying on. But I cannot help it; I must have a little spell of world
life. That other in which I qualified with hi