“That is just it. He was not constituted so that he, remaining himself, Roy, could forget you. If he goes out into this other life forgetting, he becomes another than himself. That is a far more unnatural way of creeping out of the difficulty than to assume that he loves and remembers. Why not assume that? In fact, why assume anything else? Neither reason, nor the Bible, nor common sense, forbids it. Instead of starting with it as an hypothesis to be proved if we can, I lay it down as one of those probabilities for which Butler would say, ‘the presumption amounts nearly to certainty’; and if any one can disprove it, I will hear what he has to say. There!” she broke off, laughing softly, “that is a sufficient dose of metaphysics for such a simple thing. It seems to me to lie just here: Roy loved you. Our Father, for some tender, hidden reason, took him out of your sight for a while. Though changed much, he can have forgotten nothing. Being _only out of sight_, you remember, not lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated, he goes on loving. To love must mean to think of, to care for, to hope for, to pray for, not less out of a body than in it.” “But that must mean--why, that must mean--” “That he is near you. I do not doubt it.” The sunshine quivered in among the ivy-leaves, and I turned to watch it, thinking. “I do not doubt,” she went on, speaking low,--“I cannot doubt that our absent dead are very present with us. He said, ‘I am with you alway,’ knowing the need we have of him, even to the end of the world. He must understand the need we have of them. I cannot doubt it.” I watched her as she sat with her absent eyes turned eastward, and her peculiar look--I have never seen it on another face--as of one who holds a happy secret; and while I watched I wondered. “There is a reason for it,” she said, rousing as if from a pleasant dream,--“a good sensible reason, too, it strikes me, independent of Scriptural or other proof.” “What is that?” “That God keeps us briskly at work in this world.” I did not understand. “Altogether too briskly, considering that it is a preparative world, to intend to put us from it into an idle one. What more natural than that we shall spend our best energies as we spent them here,--in comforting, teaching, helping, saving people whose very souls we love better than our own? In fact, it would be very _un_natural if we did not.” “But I thought that God took care of us, and angels, like Gabriel and the rest, if I ever thought anything about it, which I am inclined to doubt.” “‘God works by the use of means,’ as the preachers say. Why not use Roy as well as Gabriel? What archangel could understand and reach the peculiarities of your nature as he could? or, even if understanding, could so love and bear with you? What is to be done? Will they send Roy to the planet Jupiter to take care of somebody else’s sister?”