For our lives are not material, whatever our bodies may be. Our lives are the accumulations of consciousness, the assembling of our memories, our affections, our judgments, our aspirations, our weaknesses, our strength--the vast sum of all our impressions, good or bad, made upon a material plate called the brain. The brain is of the dust. The picture--which is a human life--is of the spirit. And the spirit is of God. And when by whatever laws of chance or greed, or high purpose or low desire two lives are joined until the cement of years has united the myriads of daily sensations that make up a segment of these lives, they are thus joined in the spirit forever. Now Thomas Van Dorn went about his free life day by day, glorying in his liberty. But strands of his old life, floating idly and unnoticed through minutes of his hourly existence, kept tripping him and bothering him. His meals, his clothes, his fixed habits of work, the manifold creature comforts that he prized--all the associations of his life with home--came to him a thousand, thousand times and cut little knife-edged rents in the fabric of his new freedom. And he would have said a year before that it was physically impossible for one child--one small, fair-haired child of five, with pleading face and eager eyes--to meet a man so often in a given period of time, as Lila met him. At first he had avoided her; he would duck into stores; hurry up stairways, or hide himself in groups of men on the sidewalk when he saw her coming. Then there came a time when he knew that the little figure was slipping across the street to avoid him because his presence shamed her with her playmates. He had never in his heart believed that the child meant much to him. She was merely part of the chain that held him, and yet now that she was not of him or his interests, it seemed to Thomas Van Dorn that she made a piteous figure upon the street, and that the sadness that flitted over her face when she saw him, in some way reproached him, and yet--what right had she in him--or why should he let her annoy him, or disturb his peace and the happiness that his freedom brought. Materially he noticed that she was well fed, well dressed, and he knew that she was well housed. What more could she have--but that was absurd. He couldn't wreck his life for the mere chance that a child should be petted a little. There was no sense in such a proposition. And Thomas Van Dorn's life was regulated by sense--common sense--horse sense, he called it.