They stood for a moment together but neither spoke. Together they presented afresh their offering to God, and He knew that it was costly. At breakfast neither spoke of the matter that was uppermost in their hearts. But later Hubert sought his father in the library and made known to him the step he had taken. Grief, dismay, and almost anger, struggled in the older man's heart. He looked at his son with sorrowful sternness. "Then--then, Hubert," he said very slowly, "you have concluded to leave me." A pang shot through Hubert's heart, keener than any thought of his own pain, but he answered steadily: "I have concluded, father, to follow Christ." Mr. Gray frowned. He was not conscious of frowning at the name of Christ, or at so pure a sentiment as that uttered, but grief made him insensible to what he did. "And is that," he asked with some irony, "the only way you can find of following Him? Can no one follow Him at home?" "I do not see that he can if he is called abroad, father." "And are you called?" he asked sharply, still the pain at his heart dulling any sense of shame that he could speak unsympathetically of such a thing. Hubert answered gently. "I believe I am, father," he said. Mr. Gray stared at his son silently. His face grew ashen and the hand upon the table before him trembled visibly. Hubert stood in an agony of mute sympathy. At last the father rose without a word and prepared to leave the room. His face looked older by a decade than an hour before. Hubert made a movement to detain him and opened his lips to speak; but the other waved him aside with a quick gesture of the trembling hand. And so they parted. Hubert looked after his father with a breaking heart. He had thought the crisis of his grief was passed when alone in his room he wrestled out the problem for his own heart. But now a heavier weight rested upon his soul. Must he break his father's heart? Must the hope of happy comradeship in future years be put aside, and with the disappointment his father age and weaken irrecoverably? He saw him walk down the path slowly and heavily, and a feeling of awful guilt swept over him. Was he his father's murderer? Was he following a delusion that would make himself an exile and lay his father prematurely in his grave? The thought overpowered him. He sank helplessly in a chair and groaned out his burden to the Lord. "O Lord," he prayed, "am I walking in Thy footsteps, or am I a deluded wretch, bringing sorrow, and it may be death, to those I love most?" He paused, and his head sank deeply. "Lord, this is grief," he groaned. "This is grief. I have not known it before." And so it seemed. Thoughts of his own loneliness and possible hardships seemed light compared with this.