"It will never do, Bob. We can't go back. The terrible something that I did stands irrevocably between us. The love that might have made both our lives radiant is broken, Bob--forever broken. And all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot ever put it together again. I know it now, and oh Bob, Bob, it makes me sadder than the pain of unsatisfied love in my heart. "It just can't be; nothing ever can make it as it was, and unless it could be that way--the boy and girl way, it would be something dreadful. We have missed the best in the world, Bob; we cannot enjoy the next best together. But apart, each doing his work in life as God wills it, we may find the next best, which is more than most people know. "I have found during this hour that I can pray again, Bob, and I am asking God always to let me hope for a heaven, into which I can bring a few little memories--of the time before you left me. Won't you bring yours there, too, dear? Until then--good-by. "MOLLY." The springs that move God's universe are hidden,--those that move the world of material things and those that move the world of spiritual things, and make events creep out of the past into the future so noiselessly that they seem born in the present. It is all a mystery, the half-stated equation of life that we call the scheme of things. Only this is sure, that however remote, however separated by time and space, the tragedy of life has its root in the weakness of men, and of all the heart-breaking phantasms that move across the panorama of the day, somewhere deep-rooted in our own souls' weakness is the ineradicable cause. Even God's mercy cannot separate the punishment that follows sin, and perhaps it is the greatest mercy of His mercy that it cannot do so. For when we leave this world, our books are clear. If our souls grow--we pay the price in suffering; if they shrivel, we go into the next world, poorer for our pilgrimage. So do not pity Molly Brownwell nor Robert Hendricks when you learn that as she left the station at Sycamore Ridge that night, Lige Bemis went to a gas lamp and read the note from Robert Hendricks that in her confusion she had dropped upon the floor. Only pity the miserable creature whose soul was so dead in him that he could put that note away to bide his time. In this wide universe, wherein we are growing slowly up to Godhood, only the poor leprous soul, whitened with malice and hate, deserves the angels' tears. The rest of us,--weak, failing, frail, to whom life deals its sorrows and its tears, its punishments and its anguish,--we leave this world nearer to God than when we came here, and the journey, though long and hard, has been worth the while. CHAPTER XIX