medical power to cure. It is not immediately
fatal; he said I might live many years, even to old age; and I might
die, suddenly, at any moment, just as your father died."

He said this gently and quietly--more quietly than I am writing the
words down now; and I listened--I listened.

"Phineas!"

I felt the pressure of his warm hand on my shoulder--the hand which had
led me like a brother's all my life.

"Phineas, we have known one another these forty years. Is our love,
our faith, so small, that either of us, for himself or his brother,
need be afraid of death?--"

"Phineas!"--and the second time he spoke there was some faint reproach
in the tone; "no one knows this but you. I see I was right to
hesitate; I almost wish I had not told you at all."

Then I rose.

At my urgent request, he explained to me fully and clearly the whole
truth. It was, as most truths are, less terrible when wholly known. It
had involved little suffering as yet, the paroxysms being few and rare.
They had always occurred when he was alone, or when feeling them coming
on he could go away and bear them in solitude.

"I have always been able to do so until to-night. She has not the
least idea--my wife, I mean."

His voice failed.

"It has been terrible to me at times, the thought of my wife. Perhaps I
ought to have told her. Often I resolved I would, and then changed my
mind. Latterly, since she has been ill, I have believed, almost hoped,
that she would not need to be told at all."

"Would you rather, then, that she--"

John calmly took up the word I shrank from uttering. "Yes; I would
rather of the two that she went away first. She would suffer less, and
it would be such a short parting."

He spoke as one would speak of a new abode, an impending journey. To
him the great change, the last terror of humanity, was a
thought--solemn indeed, but long familiar and altogether without fear.
And, as we sat there, something of his spirit passed into mine; I felt
how narrow is the span between the life mortal and the life
immortal--how, in truth, both are one with God.

"Ay," he said, "that is exactly what I mean. To me there is always
something impious in the 'preparing for death' that people talk about;
as if we were not continually, whether in the flesh or out of it,
living in the Father's presence; as if, come when He will, the Master
should not find all of us watching? Do you remember saying so to me,
one day?"

Ah, that