Three months later Tom got a rise in his salary, and then he insisted on raising his monthly board fee. Lucy was slightly reluctant and almost aggrieved, but when she saw the lad’s face beaming with the power of his new prosperity, she let him have his own way in the matter. So life settled down. Florence resented that her sister had chosen “to turn into a lodging-house keeper.” Lucy marvelled to note how strangely it “comes natural” to some women to belittle and contemn those ways of honest industry which lie nearest to woman’s true nature—housekeeping, house-serving, the care of the aged, and the young, and the solitary. And, oh, the pity of it! if such belittlement and contempt tend to relegate these high womanly functions only to unworthy “eye-servants”! Months passed, yet the silence of the seas remained unbroken. Now and then Lucy and the captain’s wife wrote and asked how each fared. There came no day when either drew a line across life and forbade that hope should cross it. They did not put on widow’s mourning, yet when Lucy had to buy a new dress or ribbon, Miss Latimer noticed that she bought it of black or of soberest grey. Months of such waiting had gone by ere Lucy wonderingly observed that there came to her no more her old nightmare vision of herself struggling lonely between a wild heath and a dead wall against a midnight storm. There was a sense in which the allegory of that vision was converted into fact—the silence as of death on one hand, the great rough world on the other, the storm of sorrow beating on herself. Yet now she realised that God Himself was with her on the dark wild way—she was not alone—and that made all the difference. God does not promise to uphold us in our fears and forebodings. These ought not to be. He has promised to be with us and to comfort us when the dark days shall really come. Lucy never gave voice to many of her deepest experiences at that time—that secret speech which the Father keeps for each of His children. Sometimes it seemed to her as if shafts of light penetrated her very being, revealing or illuminating the most solemn mysteries of life. Sometimes she thought of Paul’s allusion to being “caught up into the third heaven” and “hearing unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter.” This fleeting glory would fade out of Lucy’s soul even as sunshine fades off the earth. Yet Lucy felt that those “hours of insight” left her seeing “all things new.”