e world, Bob; we cannot enjoy
the next best together. But apart, each doing his work in life as
God wills it, we may find the next best, which is more than most
people know.

"I have found during this hour that I can pray again, Bob, and I am
asking God always to let me hope for a heaven, into which I can
bring a few little memories--of the time before you left me. Won't
you bring yours there, too, dear? Until then--good-by.

"MOLLY."

The springs that move God's universe are hidden,--those that move the
world of material things and those that move the world of spiritual
things, and make events creep out of the past into the future so
noiselessly that they seem born in the present. It is all a mystery,
the half-stated equation of life that we call the scheme of things.
Only this is sure, that however remote, however separated by time and
space, the tragedy of life has its root in the weakness of men, and of
all the heart-breaking phantasms that move across the panorama of the
day, somewhere deep-rooted in our own souls' weakness is the
ineradicable cause. Even God's mercy cannot separate the punishment
that follows sin, and perhaps it is the greatest mercy of His mercy
that it cannot do so. For when we leave this world, our books are
clear. If our souls grow--we pay the price in suffering; if they
shrivel, we go into the next world, poorer for our pilgrimage.

So do not pity Molly Brownwell nor Robert Hendricks when you learn
that as she left the station at Sycamore Ridge that night, Lige Bemis
went to a gas lamp and read the note from Robert Hendricks that in her
confusion she had dropped upon the floor. Only pity the miserable
creature whose soul was so dead in him that he could put that note
away to bide his time. In this wide universe, wherein we are growing
slowly up to Godhood, only the poor leprous soul, whitened with malice
and hate, deserves the angels' tears. The rest of us,--weak, failing,
frail, to whom life deals its sorrows and its tears, its punishments
and its anguish,--we leave this world nearer to God than when we came
here, and the journey, though long and hard, has been worth the while.

CHAPTER XIX

Back in the days when John Barclay had become powerful enough to
increase the price of his door strips to the railroad companies from
five dollars to seven and a half, he had transferred the business o