Then, terrified by her own impetuosity, she threw herself on the bed, weeping low. Her heart had now gone back to her grandfather; it was smiting her for ingratitude to him. Could there be shame or wrong in what he asked,--what he did? And was she to murmur if she aided him to exist? What was the opinion of a stranger boy compared to the approving sheltering love of her sole guardian and tried fostering friend? And could people choose their own callings and modes of life? If one road went this way, another that, and they on the one road were borne farther and farther away from those on the other--as that idea came, consolation stopped, and in her noiseless weeping there was a bitterness as of despair. But the tears ended by relieving the grief that caused them. Wearied out of conjecture and complaint, her mind relapsed into the old native, childish submission. With a fervour in which there was self-reproach she repeated her meek, nightly prayer, that God would bless her dear grandfather, and suffer her to be his comfort and support. Then mechanically she undressed, extinguished the candle, and crept into bed. The moonlight became bolder and bolder; it advanced tip the floors, along the walls; now it floods her very pillow, and seems to her eyes to take a holy loving kindness, holier and more loving as the lids droop beneath it. A vague remembrance of some tale of “guardian spirits,” with which Waife had once charmed her wonder, stirred through her lulling thoughts, linking itself with the presence of that encircling moonlight. There! see the eyelids are closed, no tear upon their fringe. See the dimples steal out as the sweet lips are parted. She sleeps, she dreams already! Where and what is the rude world of waking now? Are there not guardian spirits? Deride the question if thou wilt, stern man, the reasoning and self-reliant; but thou, O fair mother, who hast marked the strange happiness on the face of a child that has wept itself to sleep, what sayest thou to the soft tradition, which surely had its origin in the heart of the earliest mother? CHAPTER XV. There is no man so friendless but what he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths.