Page:Love's trilogy.djvu/381

 'GOD'S PEACE' 371

My friend in the institution mourns my faithless- less. Just now she would like so much to show me der sympathy. She does not understand, and I [lave not the courage to tell her, that my wounded lieart cannot run the gauntlet of all the pitiful glances inside the gates of the institution. They follow me up staircases and along corridors all the way to her door, and they receive me again in her room, greeting me from her own faithful eyes.

But most heartbreaking of all is it to visit Greta's father. To be in the room which she filled with her grace and beauty, where my love mourns like a tortured animal for every step I tread, where the air still trembles with her death sigh, where the old man sits staring like blind folk with his empty eyes at the calamity he has wrought. What can he and I say to one another that will bring comfort ? He hardly listens to the reasonable remarks with which I greet his self-reproach and his bewildered words about Greta's accident being the revenge of the angry spirit of the mill. I wonder if I myself am quite unaffected by his curious imaginings, or is it merely the memory of that terrible morning which awakens fearsome thoughts in my mind and makes me shudder every time I pass the mill? It is still there. Its master has not yet condemned it.

But when my loss has chased me like an outlaw from place to place I try to seek rest in my work — in my book. While I write I forget that Greta is dead. She lives again in my book; in it she is resurrected with that God's peace which she gave