to tell, they needed collecting and setting in order not a
little. The memories of eight years were all dancing through his
brain, and carrying him about whither they would; while beneath them
all, his heart was throbbing with a dull sense of a loss that could
never be made up to him. The rays of the evening sun came solemnly
through the painted windows above his head, and fell in gorgeous
colors on the opposite wall, and the perfect stillness soothed his
spirit little by little. And he turned to the pulpit, and looked at
it, and then, leaning forward with his head on his hands, groaned
aloud, "If he could only have seen the Doctor again for one five
minutes, have told him all that was in his heart, what he owed to him,
how he loved and reverenced him, and would, by God's help, follow his
steps in life and death, he could have borne it all without a murmur.
But that he should have gone away forever without knowing it all, was
too much to bear. But am I sure that he does not know it all?"--the
thought made him start. "May he not even now be near me, in this very
chapel? If he be, am I sorrowing as he would have me sorrow--as I
should wish to have sorrowed when I shall meet him again?"

He raised himself up and looked round; and after a minute rose and
walked humbly down to the lowest bench, and sat down on the very seat
which he had occupied on his first Sunday at Rugby. And then the old
memories rushed back again, but softened and subdued, and soothing him
as he felt himself carried away by them. And he looked up at the great
painted window above the altar, and remembered how when a little boy
he used to try not to look through it at the elm-trees and the rooks,
before the painted glass came--and the subscription for the painted
glass, and the letter he wrote home for money to give to it. And
there, down below, was the very name of the boy who sat on his right
hand on that first day, scratched rudely in the oak panelling.

And then came the thought of all his old schoolfellows; and form after
form of boys, nobler and braver and purer than he, rose up and seemed
to rebuke him. Could he not think of them, and what they had felt and
were feeling, they who had honored and loved from the first the man
whom he had taken years to know and love? Could he not think of those
yet dearer to him who were gone, who bore his name and shared his
blood, and were now without a husband or a father? Then the grief
which he began to share