starlit sky. His
soul was seeking earnestly that depth in our nature where the divine and
human are one, for when the brain is stupefied by the inevitable and we
know not what to abandon and what to defend, that is the sanctuary where
we shall find help for every hour of need.

What words, wonderful and secret, were there spoken it is not well to
inquire. They were for John's wounded heart alone, and though he came
from that communion weeping, it was

--as a child that cries,
But crying, knows his Father near.

Nothing was different but he sat down hushed and strengthened, and in
his heart and on his lips the most triumphant words a man or woman can
utter, _"Thy Will be done!"_ Then there was a great peace. He had cast
all his sorrow upon God and _left it with God_. He did not bring it back
with him as we are so ready to do. It was not that he comprehended any
more clearly why this sorrow and trial had come to darken his happy
home, but Oh, _what matters comprehension when there is faith!_ John did
not make inquiries; he knew by experience that there are spiritual
conditions as real as physical facts. The shadows were all gone. Nothing
was different,

--yet this much he knew,
His soul stirred in its chrysalis of clay,
A strange peace filled him like a cup; he grew
Better, wiser and gladder, on that day:
This dusty, worn-out world seemed made anew,
Because God's Way, had now become his way.

Then he fell into that sleep which God gives to his beloved, and when he
awoke it was the dayshine. The light streamed in through the eastern
windows, there was a robin singing on his window sill, and there was no
trouble in his heart but what he could face.

His business was now urging him to be diligent, and his business--being
that of so many others, he durst not neglect it. Jane he did not see.
Her maid said she had been ill all night and had fallen asleep at the
dawning, and John left her a written message and went earlier to the
mill than usual. But Greenwood was there, busily examining bales of
cotton and singing and scolding alternately as he worked. John joined
him and they had a hard morning's work together, throughout which only
one subject occupied both minds--the mill and cotton to feed its looms.

In the afternoon Greenwood took up the more human phase of the question.
He told John that six of their unmarried men had gone to America. "They
think m