As soon as he began to speak, however, I saw that he was only bewildered,--honestly bewildered, and honestly shocked: I do not doubt that I had said bewildering and shocking things. “My friend,” he said solemnly, “I shall pray for you and leave you in the hands of God. Your brother, whom He has removed from this earthly life for His own wise--” “We will not talk any more about Roy, if you please,” I interrupted; “_he_ is happy and safe.” “Hem!--I hope so,” he replied, moving uneasily in his chair; “I believe he never made a profession of religion, but there is no limit to the mercy of God. It is very unsafe for the young to think that they can rely on a death-bed repentance, but our God is a covenant-keeping God, and Royal’s mother was a pious woman. If you cannot say with certainty that he is numbered among the redeemed, you are justified, perhaps, in hoping so.” I turned sharply on him, but words died on my lips. How could I tell the man of that short, dear letter that came to me in December,--that Roy’s was no death-bed repentance, but the quiet, natural growth of a life that had always been the life of the pure in heart; of his manly beliefs and unselfish motives; of that dawning sense of friendship with Christ of which he used to speak so modestly, dreading lest he should not be honest with himself? “Perhaps I ought not to call myself a Christian,” he wrote,--I learned the words by heart.--“and I shall make no profession to be such, till I am sure of it, but my life has not seemed to me for a long time to be my own. ‘Bought with a price’ just expresses it. I can point to no time at which I was conscious by any revolution of feeling of ‘experiencing a change of heart,’ but it seems to me that a man’s heart might be changed for all that. I do not know that it is necessary for us to be able to watch every footprint of God. The _way_ is all that concerns us,--to see that we follow it and Him. This I am sure of; and knocking about in this army life only convinces me of what I felt in a certain way before,--that it is the only way, and He the only guide _to_ follow.” But how could I say anything of this to Deacon Quirk?--this my sealed and sacred treasure, of all that Roy left me the dearest. At any rate I did not. It seemed both obstinate and cruel in him to come there and say what he had been saying. He might have known that I would not say that Roy had gone to Heaven, if--why, if there had been the breath of a doubt. It is a possibility of which I cannot rationally conceive, but I suppose that his name would never have passed my lips. So I turned away from Deacon Quirk, and shut my mouth, and waited for him to finish. Whether the idea began to struggle into his mind that he _might_ not have been making a very comforting remark, I cannot say; but he started very soon to go.