"Let her come next week for a day or two, if you can spare her. But I'll not tell her that it's the last 'good-bye.' All the same, I'm afraid she'll guess it for herself." "Try to do her good--same as you have me," said Brendon. "You won't speak many more words on human ears now. Let 'em be as the Lord wills. He'll put it into your heart what to say to her. A better, nobler woman than my wife never lived. Fearless and brave and high-minded--I never saw the like of her and never shall. But all the same, from the first--from our courting--there was always something I couldn't understand. Her point of view--not all pure godliness; yet I'd not dare to say she was ungodly in anything. But a sort of high habit of mind that wouldn't bend to the yoke. Always hated and still hates to call herself a miserable sinner afore the footstool of Grace. Yet humble, and gentle, and true to my heart and my hopes here and hereafter, as the moss is true to the stone." "No man was ever worthy of her, Daniel." "I know it. Tell her the meek are blessed and inherit the earth." "And blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. I've never known but one woman that I could think of as able to look at God, Daniel, and that's your wife. Don't ask me to dare to teach her--'tis for her to teach me; and teach you too. Why should she be fearful? She can't be. Perfect love casteth out fear. That's her lesson to us." Brendon considered doubtfully. "You may be right," he said. "All the same----" And when the future owner of Ruddyford returned home, his wife made ready. She knew full well without words that this was her last visit to Hilary Woodrow; and she braced her mind for the ordeal and all that it must mean. She had long since ceased to fear that he would speak, and when Sarah Jane and Hilary met for the last time it was not necessary for him to inform her that their secret perished with themselves. "Leave it to be told in the next world, if it is right that it should be told," he said to her. "Sometimes I think it may be a part of my purgation and proper punishment, in some place of learning and cleansing, that I may yet have to confess this terrible sin before my fellow spirits--even to the spirit of Daniel himself, when his turn comes. That seems justice, Sarah Jane, as man pictures justice in his feeble ignorance. But at any rate I'm convinced, so far as this life goes, that the proper course is silence. We've no right to wreck lives by imparting our knowledge to them, if that knowledge can only bring ceaseless suffering along with it. I've confessed my sin to God a thousand times. But I know that both punishment and absolution belong to the world to come, not to this." "Like a schoolboy called up afore his master--to learn the best or worst," she said. "Even like that. Nothing's settled down here; nothing is finished down here. Everything has to wait till the light touches it."