These were meant for happy days. They rang cold as steel upon the warm needs of an afflicted man. Brought face to face, and sharply, with the blank heaven of his belief, he stood up from before his dead, and groped about it, and cried out against it in the bitterness of his soul. “I had no chance to prepare myself to bow to the will of God,” he said, his reserved ministerial manner in curious contrast with the caged way in which he was pacing the room,--“I had no chance. I am taken by surprise, as by a thief in the night. I had a great deal to say to her, and there was no time. She could tell me what to do with my poor little children. I wanted to tell her other things. I wanted to tell her--Perhaps we all of us have our regrets when the Lord removes our friends; we may have done or left undone many things; we might have made them happier. My mind does not rest with assurance in its conceptions of the heavenly state. If I never can tell her--” He stopped abruptly, and paced into the darkest shadows of the shadowed room, his face turned away. “You said once some pleasant things about heaven?” he said at last, half appealingly, stopping in front of her, hesitating; like a man and like a minister, hardly ready to come with all the learning of his schools and commentators and sit at the feet of a woman. She talked with him for a time in her unobtrusive way, deferring, when she honestly could, to his clerical judgment, and careful not to wound him by any word; but frankly and clearly, as she always talks. When she rose to go he thanked her quietly. “This is a somewhat novel train of thought to me,” he said; “I hope it may not prove an unscriptural one. I have been reading the book of Revelation to-day with these questions especially in mind. We are never too old to learn. Some passages may be capable of other interpretations than I have formerly given them. No matter what I _wish_, you see, I must be guided by the Word of my God.” Auntie says that she never respected the man so much as she did when, hearing those words, she looked up into his haggard face, convulsed with its human pain and longing. “I hope you do not think that _I_ am not guided by the Word of God,” she answered. “I mean to be.” “I know you mean to be,” he said cordially. “I do not say that you are not. I may come to see that you are, and that you are right. It will be a peaceful day for me if I can ever quite agree with your methods of reasoning. But I must think these things over. I thank you once more for coming. Your sympathy is grateful to me.” Just as she closed the door he called her back. “See,” he said, with a saddened smile. “At least I shall never preach _this_ again. It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.” He held up before her a mass of old blue manuscript, and threw it, as he spoke, upon the embers left in his grate. It smoked and blazed up and burned out.