the old man when he rose to go at last, "I guess
you've settled it for me. You've made me see that there can be an
immortal life that's worth living; and I was afraid there wa'n't! I
shouldn't care, now, if I woke up any morning in the other world. I
guess it would be all right; and that there would be new conditions
every way, so that a man could go on and be himself, without feelin'
that he was in any danger of bein' wasted. You've made me want to meet
my boy again; and I used to dread it; I didn't think I was fit for it. I
don't know whether you expect me to thank you; I presume you don't; but
I"--he faltered, and his voice shook in sympathy with the old hand that
he put trembling into Ewbert's--"I _bless_ you!"

XIII.

The time had come when the minister must seek refuge and counsel with
his wife. He went to her as a troubled child goes to its mother, and she
heard the confession of his strange experience with the motherly
sympathy which performs the comforting office of perfect intelligence.
If she did not grasp its whole significance, she seized what was perhaps
the main point, and she put herself in antagonism to the cause of his
morbid condition, while administering an inevitable chastisement for the
neglect of her own prevision.

"That terrible old man," she said, "has simply been draining the life
out of you, Clarence. I saw it from the beginning, and I warned you
against it; but you wouldn't listen to me. _Now_ I suppose you _will_
listen, after the doctor tells you that you're in danger of nervous
prostration, and that you've got to give up everything and rest. _I_
think you've been in danger of losing your reason, you've overworked it
so; and I sha'n't be easy till I've got you safely away at the seaside,
and out of the reach of that--that _vampire_."

"Emily!" the minister protested. "I can't allow you to use such
language. At the worst, and supposing that he has really been that drain
upon me which you say (though I don't admit it), what is my life for but
to give to others?"

"But _my_ life isn't for you to give to others, and _your_ life _is_
mine, and I think I have some right to say what shall be done with it,
and I don't choose to have it used up on old Hilbrook." It passed
through Ewbert's languid thought, which it stirred to a vague amusement,
that the son of an older church than the Rixonite might have found in
this thoroughly terrestrial attitude of his wife a potent argument for
sacerdo