Then, casting away all caution, I answered: "It is precisely a knowledge of those greater matters concerning the family which I have been hungering after ever since I came into the house." "I know it," she returned. "This hunger you speak of was partly the cause of your fever, and it is in you, keeping you feverish and feeble still; but for this, instead of being a prisoner here, you would now be abroad, feeling the sun and wind on your face." "And if you know that," I pleaded, "why do you not now impart the knowledge that can make me whole? For surely, all those lesser matters--those things suitable for one in my condition to know--can be learned afterwards, in due time. For they are not of pressing importance, but the other is to me a matter of life and death, if you only knew it." "I know everything," she returned quickly. But a cloud had come over her face at my concluding words, and a startled look into her eyes. "Life and death! do you know what you are saying?" she exclaimed, fixing her eyes on me with such intense earnestness in them that mine fell abashed before their gaze. Then, after a while, she drew my head down against her knees, and spoke with a strange tenderness. "Do you then find it so hard to exercise a little patience, my son, that you do not acquiesce in what I say to you, and fear to trust your future in my hands? My time is short for all that I have to do, yet I also must be patient and wait, although for me it is hardest. For now your coming, which I did not regard at first, seeing in you only a pilgrim like others--one who through accidents of travel had been cast away and left homeless in the world, until we found and gave you shelter--now, it has brought something new into my life: and if this fresh hope, which is only an old, perished hope born again, ever finds fulfillment, then death will lose much of its bitterness. But there are difficulties in the way which only time, and the energy of a soul that centers all its faculties in one desire, one enterprise, can overcome. And the chief difficulty I find is in yourself--in that strange, untoward disposition so often revealed in your conversation, which you have shown even now; for to be thus questioned and pressed, and to have my judgment doubted, would have greatly offended me in another. Remember this, and do not abuse the privilege you enjoy: remember that you must greatly change before I can share with you the secrets of my heart that concern you. And bear in mind, my son, that I am not rebuking you for a want of knowledge; for I know that for many deficiencies you are not blameworthy. I know, for instance, that nature has denied to you that melodious and flexible voice in which it is our custom every day to render homage to the Father, to express all the sacred feelings of our hearts, all our love for each other, the joy we have in life, and even our griefs and sorrows. For grief is like a dark, oppressive cloud, until from lip and