"Well, my dear," he squeezed her gloved hand and in the darkness put his
arm about her, "let's not worry about him. All I know is that I wanted
to square it with him for taking care of the horse and five dollars
won't hurt his self-respect. And," said the bridegroom as he pressed the
bride very close to his heart, "what is it to us? We have each other, so
what do we care----what is all the world to us?"
As the midnight train whistled out of South Harvey Grant Adams sitting
on a bedside was fondly unbuttoning a small body from its clothes, ready
to hear a sleepy child's voice say its evening prayers. In his heart
there flamed the love for the child that was beckoning him into love for
every sentient thing. And as Laura Van Dorn, bride of Thomas of that
name, heard the whistle, her being was flooded with a love high and
marvelous, washing in from the infinite love that moves the universe and
carrying her soul in aspiring thrills of joy out to ride upon the
mysterious currents that we know are not of ourselves, and so have
called divine.
In the morning, in the early gray of morning, when Grant Adams rose to
make the fire for breakfast, he found his father, sitting by the kitchen
table, half clad as he had risen from a restless bed. Scrawled sheets of
white paper lay around him on the floor and the table. He said sadly:
"She can't come, Grant--she can't come. I dreamed of her last night; it
was all so real--just as she was when we were young, and I thought--I
was sure she was near." He sighed as he leaned back in his chair. "But
they've looked for her--all of them have looked for her. She knows I'm
calling--but she can't come." The father fumbled the papers, rubbed his
gray beard, and shut his fine eyes as he shook his head, and whispered:
"What holds her--what keeps her? They all come but her."
"What's this, father?" asked Grant, as a page closely written in a fine
hand fluttered to the floor.
"Oh, nothing--much--just Mr. Left bringing me some message from Victor
Hugo. It isn't much."
But the Eminent Authority who put it into the Proceedings of the
Psychological Society laid more store by it than he did by the scraps
and incoherent bits of jargon which pictured the old man's lonely grief.
They are not preserved for us, but in the Proceedings, on page 1125, we
have this from Mr. Left:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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