ompassed. But were my analysis
correct as fact itself, and my showing of it as exact as words could
make it, never a man on whom some such change had not at least begun to
pass, would find in it any revelation. He ceased altogether to vaunt his
denials, not that now he had discarded them, but simply because he no
longer delighted in them. They were not interesting to him any more. He
grew yet paler and thinner. He ate little and slept ill--and the waking
hours of the night were hours of torture. He was out of health, and he
knew it, but that did not comfort him. It was wrong and its misery that
had made him ill, not illness that had made him miserable. Was he a
weakling, a fool not to let the past be the past? "Things without all
remedy should be without regard: what's done is done." But not every
strong man who has buried his murdered in his own garden, and set up no
stone over them, can forget where they lie. It needs something that is
not strength to be capable of that. The dead alone can bury their dead
so; and there is a bemoaning that may help to raise the dead. But
sometimes such dead come alive unbemoaned. Oblivion is not a tomb strong
enough to keep them down. The time may come when a man will find his
past but a cenotaph, and its dead all walking and making his present
night hideous. And when such dead walk so, it is a poor chance they do
not turn out vampires.

When she had buried her dead out of her sight, Dorothy sought solitude
and the things unseen more than ever. The Wingfolds were like swallows
about her, never folding their wings of ministry, but not haunting her
with bodily visitation. She never refused to see them, but they
understood: the hour was not yet when their presence would be a comfort
to her. The only comfort the heart can take must come--not from, but
through itself. Day after day she would go into the park, avoiding the
lodge, and there brood on the memories of her father and his late words.
And ere long she began to feel nearer to him than she had ever felt
while he was with her. For, where the outward sign has been understood,
the withdrawing of it will bring the inward fact yet nearer. When our
Lord said the spirit of Himself would come to them after He was gone, He
but promised the working of one of the laws of His Father's kingdom: it
was about to operate in loftiest grade.

Most people find the first of a bereavement more tolerable than what
follows. They find in its fever a suppor