I thought about it a minute, and then turned my face up to her. “Mary, what a light in your eyes! How is it?” It came over me slowly, but it came with such a passion of gratitude and unworthiness, that I scarcely knew how to tell her--that He never has been to me, in all my life, what he is now at the end of these six months. He was once an abstract Grandeur which I struggled more in fear than love to please. He has become a living Presence, dear and real. “No dead fact stranded on the shore Of the oblivious years; But warm, sweet, tender, even yet A present help.” ... He was an inexorable Mystery who took Roy from me to lose him in the glare of a more inexorable heaven. He is a Father who knew better than we that we should be parted for a while; but He only means it to be a little while. He is keeping him for me to find in the flush of some summer morning, on which I shall open my eyes no less naturally than I open them on June sunrises now. I always have that fancy of going in the morning. She understood what I could not tell her, and said, “I thought it would be so.” “You, His interpreter, have done it,” I answered her. “His heaven shows what He is,--don’t you see?--like a friend’s letter. I could no more go back to my old groping relations to Him, than I could make of you the dim and somewhat apocryphal Western Auntie that you were before I saw you.” “Which was precisely why I have dealt with this subject as I have,” she said. “You had all your life been directed to an indefinite heaven, where the glory of God was to crowd out all individuality and all human joy from His most individual and human creatures, till the “Glory of God” had become nothing but a name and a dread to you. So I let those three words slide by, and tried to bring you to them, as Christ brought the Twelve to believe in him, ‘for the works’ sake.’ “Yes, my child; clinging human loves, stifled longings, cries for rest, forgotten hopes, shall have their answer. Whatever the bewilderment of beauties folded away for us in heavenly nature and art, they shall strive with each other to make us glad. These things have their pleasant place. But, through eternity, there will be always something beyond and dearer than the dearest of them. God himself will be first,--naturally and of necessity, without strain or struggle, _first_.” When I sat here last winter with my dead in my house, those words would have roused in me an agony of wild questionings. I should have beaten about them and beaten against them, and cried in my honest heart that they were false. I _knew_ that I loved Roy more than I loved such a Being as God seemed to me then to be. Now, they strike me as simply and pleasantly true. The more I love Roy, the more I love Him. He loves us both.