Page:The Great Secret.djvu/59

Rh have friends and homes ought to go back. I have no friends and no home, therefore I shall have to find a place for myself." She was not feeling lonely with that firm hand holding hers. If she had been going to live on this earth, she might have felt it wrong to cling to that hand, but when one is about to die it is different. Her husband had cast her off, and death was about to give her back her liberty. How blessed an assurance that was of Christ's, that there would be no marriages in the land she was about to enter—friendships, perhaps, and freedom.

He was thinking also, with that slender hand in his. As people are said to see a panorama of their past lives rise up before them at the hour of death, he saw his unroll. The love of his boyhood flashed out. How he had loved that wife of his! Never had he been false to her, although her savage jealousy had deemed him so. She had been his idol, his goddess of clay. Then the bitterness of the years passed, when, out of despair, he bore the blame, and allowed her to defame him. She was praying, possibly, at that moment—thinking how good she was, how worthy of heaven in discarding him, for, to her ailing imagination, he would always appear a monster of evil. His love lay buried long ago. She had heaped upon it a mountain of ashes and ignominy. Living, he would be nothing to her; dead, he would himself feel free.

The little hand in his was that of a tired-out child, towards whom he had to act the elder brother's part. They would both go through the river together—where?

Portions of the Beatus Vir came into his mind now, and it comforted him:—

"Acceptable is the man who is merciful and lendeth;