"I have always done as Oona bid me. And though I feel as strong as a horse this morning, she is probably right. I used to think, on the way home, that I should never be able to get rest enough." After that the days passed, and Pierce seemed to have accepted the invalid's part even gratefully. I would have said he was quite content, except that once or twice he reproached himself for being an expense to us. "I am a useless beggar, little Hilda," he said to me one day when I was alone with him, "and I am bitterly ashamed to have come home empty-handed. I fought against that as long as I could,--so long that it was near being a case of never coming home at all." "Oh, Pierce, that would have been the real cruelty and the real wrong!" I cried out. "I felt that, Hilda. I thought it would be the cruellest wrong of all if I were to die out there, and leave Aline the heritage of that eternal sorrow. I kept hoping that things would be better. Indeed, Hilda, I endured much before I made up my mind to come. Yet I always knew that, in a certain contingency, I would come, and for that I kept my passage-money inviolate, even when I was starving." "Starving, Pierce?" "Yes, child, starving,--like many a better man. Privation paved the way for sickness with me. But you will not tell Aline, nor anyone else. I don't want to squirm under my punishment, which I richly deserved. And I would not have Aline's tender heart wrung afterwards to think upon such things." "She need never know," I said. "We will make you well, Pierce, and Aline will be happy." Then I saw a light of exaltation break over his face. "Life and death are in God's hands, little one," he said, "and if it is death for me, I shall not repine. It may happen to a man to save his soul alive in the very gates of death." I said nothing. With that light on his face I could not talk of death as if it were the last evil. "I have known worse than death," he went on dreamily, "but the knowledge shall die with me. God knows it is no merit of mine that I did not give my immortal soul for the asking. I have been snatched out of the gates of hell, little Hilda, and shall I be afraid of the Valley of the Shadow? Ah! there are terrible things in the world out there, crueller than wolves, deadlier than serpents." We were silent for a time. Pierce had turned his face away, and when he looked at me again I could have thought there were tears in his eyes, but perhaps it was because I was crying myself. "You see, there is nothing to be sad about," he said softly, "even if I am very ill. There is more joy in heaven,--ah, yes! and if there is joy in heaven, is there not cause for joy on earth? Believe me, child, there is no real sadness, no real sorrow on earth, except sin. All else that seems sad to us is because we see as in a glass, darkly."