Here, somehow or other, the things about him did not seem so much absorbed in the past, notwithstanding those untroubled rows of papers bundled in red tape. True, they looked almost awful in their lack of interest and their non-humanity, for there is scarcely anything that absolutely loses interest save the records of money; but his mother's workbox lay behind them. And, strange to say, the side of that bed drew him to kneel down: he did not yet believe that prayer was in vain. If God had not answered him before, that gave no certainty that he would not answer him now. It was, he found, still as rational as it had ever been to hope that God would answer the man that cried to him. This came, I think, from the fact that God had been answering him all the time, although he had not recognized his gifts as answers. Had he not given him Ericson, his intercourse with whom and his familiarity with whose doubts had done anything but quench his thirst after the higher life? For Ericson's, like his own, were true and good and reverent doubts, not merely consistent with but in a great measure springing from devoutness and aspiration. Surely such doubts are far more precious in the sight of God than many beliefs? He kneeled and sent forth one cry after the Father, arose, and turned towards the shelves, removed some of the bundles of letters, and drew out his mother's little box. There lay the miniature, still and open-eyed as he had left it. There too lay the bit of paper, brown and dry, with the hymn and the few words of sorrow written thereon. He looked at the portrait, but did not open the folded paper. Then first he thought whether there might not be something more in the box: what he had taken for the bottom seemed to be a tray. He lifted it by two little ears of ribbon, and there, underneath, lay a letter addressed to his father, in the same old-fashioned handwriting as the hymn. It was sealed with brown wax, full of spangles, impressed with a bush of something--he could not tell whether rushes or reeds or flags. Of course he dared not open it. His holy mother's words to his erring father must be sacred even from the eyes of their son. But what other or fitter messenger than himself could bear it to its destination? It was for this that he had been guided to it. For years he had regarded the finding of his father as the first duty of his manhood: it was as if his mother had now given her sanction to the quest, with this letter to carry to the husband who, however he might have erred, was yet dear to her. He replaced it in the box, but the box no more on the forsaken shelf with its dreary barricade of soulless records. He carried it with him, and laid it in the bottom of his box, which henceforth he kept carefully locked: there lay as it were the pledge of his father's salvation, and his mother's redemption from an eternal grief.