No, money isn't everything, Margaret's heart answered them. Money is nothing, after a certain point; nothing is anything except the love of your dearest, the sound of a living voice, the sight of a dear face, the touch of a thin, gaunt cheek against your own. "Oh, she must live," she cried dumbly to herself, though never a sign or movement betrayed it. "I wish I could send my own life into your heart, darling; but live--live till father comes. Oh, dear Christ, if You can see into our hearts, as people say, let my mother live, or, if she must die soon, still let her live till my father comes--or till I get to her," she added, in despair, for in her heart she felt as if the rest must be denied. "We love her, love her best on earth, as she does us." "Why, it's Guildford already," the woman said. "I declare, this train is in a hurry." She reached down the basket that was in the rack, the man rose, they opened the carriage door, and again Margaret was left alone. The oil in the lamp burned low and flickered; she opened the window at the other end--they were both open--and the soft darkness of the summer night came in. She knelt by the carriage door, and rested her arms on the window-frame and her face down on them; it gave her a devotional feeling; it made her love the land and trees and the great sky above them; they had always seemed to understand everything; she felt as if they did now. The scent of the pines came to her; she could see the fir-trees black and dim as the train rushed past; but all nature seemed to know the misery in her heart--it soothed her and made her able to bear it calmly. She looked up at the little stars that had been there thousands of years before she was born, and would be there thousands of years to come--at the stars and the black trees that made the shadows, at the woods in which she had never trodden and yet knew so well, at the deep gray sky, the rough fence that bounded the railway line--and everything seemed to know as she passed by that she was going to her mother, only to find that nothing, nothing in this wide world, can alter the inexorable law of nature and the great decree when it has once been given.