and then was gloomily still.

"It is as if the dead yonder would drive us back from their rest and
silence,"--his speculative eye wandering dreamily out into the night.

But death and all that lay beyond were real to the practical woman
beside him; there was no speculation in her eyes; it was an actual life
he was dragging from before her; her child was in it; some day her own
feet in Mesh and blood would tread there. She put her hand on his
shoulder and leaned out beyond him, peering down over the shore, just as
if in the night and cold beyond lay in truth the land of the dead.

"I am not afraid of their rest and silence," she cried,--"I'm not
afraid, Jerome!"

The fair, clear-cut face came warm and living between him and the
darkness; her voice called into the vague distance cheerful and strong.

She turned back to him glowing with color.

"Our boy is there," she said; "and there are others dead that I loved. I
always knew they'd keep a watch for us, Jerome!"

He listened with a sad smile.

"And I've _no_ fear," she went on, energetically, "I never had any fear,
that He would give them back to us just misty, holy angels, who could
neither cry nor laugh with us, when our very hearts were sick to catch
their hands and kiss their lips again.--I know," after a pause, "my boy
will come first to me, with his old trick of hiding and calling for
'Mother, mother!'--he'll not forget I liked that name the best; and
he'll have the same laugh in his eyes, just the same,--he'd find no
better look in heaven than that was. I knew, when I closed his eyes that
night, it was but for a little while." Yet she stopped suddenly, putting
her hand to her throat to choke back a cry of pain, "A little while,"
she repeated, firmly.

Her husband listened, the smile growing more bitter: she had never
seemed more silly or more dear to him than then.

"I am not a child," she said, quickly. "It is not fancy. The dead are in
Christ's kingdom; and He is alive, not dead, yonder. It was a real man,
Jerome, that ascended from the mountain, loving his friend, censuring
Peter, taking care of his mother. Mary found no spirit there, when she
died, but the son whose baby-head rested on her breast; and I shall find
my boy."

He soothed her, for she had grown nervous and trembling; let her cling
to his neck and cry away her trouble, after the fashion of women who
have brought their hearts out to argue for them.

"Let us forget that far-away countr