vel true? Did it really exist? For if it did, it must have food
and cherishing. Inevitably then he thought of grannie, and his
struggling mind seemed to appeal to her clarity, question and answer,
and to every question she smiled and told him the dream was true. It did
live, this mystery, this imperishable one that came from the bosom of
God and would return in safety there.

Osmond rose, in the dewy midnight, and stretched his arms to heaven. He
felt what he never had before, in his iron acquiescence, an ecstasy of
worship. This was what grannie felt, he knew; it was the daily draught
that kept her spirit young. He made no doubt she was praying for him at
that moment, and that their buoyant certainties were meeting in the air
of quickened life. Hitherto he had walked. Now he saw the use of wings.

He knew what Rose was doing. She would not be waking. She would be lying
in her bed asleep, too secure in her glad confidence to wonder over it.
Another thought swept in and awoke his quivering sentience to the marvel
of his life. Some recognition of the cherishing maternal seemed to grow
in him, and as grannie had saved his body for him, so now Rose seemed to
have given birth to his new soul. It was like a shining child. With his
bodily eyes he almost saw it through the dark, and he longed to take it
in his arms to where she slept and lay it on her breast. He could fancy
how the shining child would lie there and how, sleeping, her sweet soul
would cherish it. And whether he began the next day with the resolve to
give her up or to relinquish his own doubts, at least he had had the
vision. As the dawn broke he seemed to see her coming toward him, the
spirit of it, rosy-clad, bearing in her hands, outstretched, a beaker
for his lips. It was the water of life, and her face besought him to
know finally that they were to drink of it together. He was shaken with
the wonder of it. All his past had been preparing him for ignominy and
loss. He trembled when he saw what the girl in the vision meant: that
the greater quest is farther yet.

XXXII

Madam Fulton and Electra were busy, each in her own track, making ready
to go. Electra was truly concerned because grandmother had fallen into
this frenzy of setting her belongings in order and would even fly up to
town to her little apartment, on mysterious errands. But Madam Fulton
was as gayly confident as she was inscrutable, and even when Billy Stark
warned her that she was doin