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!"

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, labor,
achievement,--eternal.

"_Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast_,"--favorite 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 skeptic--believed in it, and called it Love. Even Goethe
himself, what was it he said? "_Der Allumfasser, der Allerhalter, fasst
und erhaelt er nicht dich, mich, sich selbst_?"

There was a curious power in the words, as he lingered over them, like
half-comprehended music,--as simple and tender as if they had come from
the depths of a woman's heart: it touched him deeper than hi