"I have already done it," I said. "I am going to move to-day to Dr. Gottlieb’s; there I shall work out my plans." My Aunt smiled grimly. "I want you to remember one thing when I am gone. Don’t give up—remember Old Hickory." I looked up at her quickly. I saw something in her eye that gave me heart again. I bade her good-by. I dared not say it to Eloise. I slipped away, but I watched the train of cars die away behind the trail of smoke in the distance as I rode back home, and it seemed as if my whole afterlife lay clouded in that path of smoke. It was hard to give up my home, the old home, every tree I knew, and with them Eloise and my life-dream.... One’s dream and one’s home—what else is there which grips so the very tendrils of one’s soul. To give up one cuts deeply into the roots of the heart, but when the blow is doubled, there is only one thing that can make one stand upright and not fall, and that is the Spirit Within. People have different ideas of God as their souls reveal. It runs all the way from the pitiable, crude, faint conception which comes to the savage in cloud, a sun, or star or image of stone, to the higher mind which perceives Him in the Great Spirit of the Universe. None of these is my idea of God. I have never been able to dissociate God from my own self. I have never been able to conceive of Him as apart from me.... And not always the same, but always there.... In my meaner self so little of Him is there, so tiny a spot of the divine light ... so faint, so seemingly nothing. And this is the greatest of it—this is the test—the very divinest evidence. _He is always there_; and when a blow comes, humbling the material, the meaner of me, then He claims His own—my nobler self—taking it unto His care, flooding it with His presence. It is then, searching yourself and your own heart that you find Him—that you know that you are a part of God because He is there! Riding home it all swept over me so. In my innermost soul I knew it: like a flash came the inspiration of it, the old Prophet of Deuteronomy: "_As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings._" Did God mean in this, the wrecking of my nest, that I should fly—even as a young eagle? "And remember Satan, Jack, to keep him fit," I heard Eloise’s voice say. *CHAPTER XVI* *HEART’S-EASE*