"Then I will not say another word, except to tell you that your goodness to me in these latter days--your friendship, so frankly, so freely given--has steeped my soul in peace--has filled my mind with sweet memories which will sooth my hours of decline, when I am far from this dear house where I was once so happy. I wish I could leave some pleasant memory here when I am gone--I wish your boy had been old enough to remember me in the days to come, as one who loved him better than any one on earth could love him, after his father and mother." Christabel answered no word. She sat with her hand before her eyes--tears streaming slowly down her cheeks--tears that were happily invisible in the faint light of the shaded lamps and the fading fire. And then they went on to talk of life in the abstract--its difficulties--its problems--its consolations--and of death--and the dim world beyond--the unknown land of universal recompense, where the deep joys striven after here, and never attained, are to be ours in a purer and more spiritual form--where love shall no longer walk hand in hand with pain and sorrow, dogged by the dark spectre Death. Illness and solitude had done much to exalt and spiritualize Angus Hamleigh's mind. The religion of dogma, the strict hard-and-fast creed which was the breath of life to Leonard's mother, had never been grappled with or accepted by him--but it was in his nature to be religious. Never at his worst had he sheltered his errors under the brazen front of paganism--never had he denied the beauty of a pure and perfect life, a simple childlike faith, heroic self-abnegating love of God and man. He had admired and honoured such virtue in others, and had been sorry that Nature had cast him in a lower mould. Then had come the sentence which told him that his days here were to be of the fewest, and, without conscious effort, his thoughts had taken a more serious cast. The great problem had come nearer home to him--and he had found its only solution to be hope--hope more or less vague and dim--more or less secure and steadfast--according to the temperament of the thinker. All metaphysical argument for or against--all theological teaching could push the thing no further. It seemed to him that it was the universal instinct of mankind to desire and hope for an imperishable life, purer, better, fairer than the life we know here--and that innate in every human breast there dwells capacity for immortality, and disbelief in extinction--and to this universal instinct he surrendered himself unreservedly, content to demand no stronger argument than that grand chapter of Corinthians which has consoled so many generations of mourners.