"... _Suppose I never grow up and Elizabeth does. How is that? I wouldn't like that. How do you straighten that out?_" "_I can't straighten that out._" "_Then I can't straighten it out, either._" * * * * * "So young--so young!" muttered the doctor. "I was pretty old!" One warm night the doctor walked out of doors. The south wind blew softly in his face, lifting his hair. All round the house in yard and garden and farther away in the woods and fields everything was growing. It was a night when the earth seemed given up to the festival of youth: it was the hour of youth: of its triumph in Nature. Little aware of where his feet carried him, he was now in the garden and now in the yard. And in the garden, low down, how sturdy little things were growing: the little radishes, the young beets, the beans--those children of the earth, flawless in their descent and environment--with what unarrestable force they were growing! Afterwards in the yard he passed some beds of lilies of the valley--most delicate breath of all flowers: how fragile but how strong, how safe in their unsullied parentage, in their ample wedlock! All about the house the steady rush of the young! And within it--as a mausoleum--the youth of all youth for him--stopped! * * * * * Most obedient and well-trained and irresponsible Death! Thou hast no grudge against us nor bearest toward any of us malice nor ill-will! Thou stayest away as long as thou canst and never comest till thou must! Thou visitant without will of thine own! Quickening Death, that also givest to the will of another not the shock of death, but the shock of new life! There loomed in the darkness before the doctor as he wandered about a true picture: an ancient people in an ancient land weighed upon by their transgressions which they could neither transfer to one another nor lay upon mother earth. So once a year one of them in behalf of himself and the rest chose an exemplar of their faithful flocks and herds, and folding his hands upon its head laid upon it the burden of guilt and shame, and then had it led out of the camp--to wild waste places where no one dwelt--"_to a land not inhabited_." ... And now he had sent away his son into the eternal with his own life faults and failings on him.... He turned back into the house--passed through the sick room--passed through his library, passed the portrait of his wife in her bridal veil--passed down the hall--knocked at her door and opened it wide and stood in the opening:-- "... My wife, I have come to you...! Will you come to him...?" VI LIVING OUT THE YEARS