found her weeping; and when gently she urged her to sleep, she would
wipe her eyes so patiently and turn her head with such obedient
sweetness, that her mother's heart utterly failed her. For hours Mary
sat in her room with James's last letter spread out before her. How
anxiously had she studied every word and phrase in it, weighing them to
see if the hope of eternal life were in them! How she dwelt on those
last promises! Had he kept them? Ah! to die without one word more! Would
no angel tell her?--would not the loving God, who knew all, just whisper
one word? He must have read the little Bible! What had he thought? What
did he feel in that awful hour when he felt himself drifting on to that
fearful eternity? Perhaps he had been regenerated,--perhaps there had
been a sudden change;--who knows?--she had read of such
things;--_perhaps_--Ah, in that perhaps lies a world of anguish! Love
will not hear of it. Love _dies_ for certainty. Against an uncertainty
who can brace the soul? We put all our forces of faith and prayer
against it, and it goes down just as a buoy sinks in the water, and the
next moment it is up again. The soul fatigues itself with efforts which
come and go in waves; and when with laborious care she has adjusted all
things in the light of hope, back flows the tide, and sweeps all away.
In such struggles life spends itself fast; an inward wound does not
carry one deathward more surely than this worst wound of the soul. God
has made us so mercifully that there is no _certainty_, however
dreadful, to which life-forces do not in time adjust themselves,--but to
uncertainty there is no possible adjustment. Where is he? Oh, question
of questions!--question which we suppress, but which a power of infinite
force still urges on the soul, who feels a part of herself torn away.

Mary sat at her window in evening hours, and watched the slanting
sunbeams through the green blades of grass, and thought one year ago he
stood there, with his well-knit, manly form, his bright eye, his buoyant