XXII.
Peace from Above.
"You went off in such haste yesterday that we'd not time to have out half our say," said Ben Stone to Ned Franks, as, called in by the carpenter's wife, he walked up to the patient's bedside.
Franks smiled, agreeably surprised to find that Stone wished to renew such a conversation.
"Take a chair, my good friend, and sit down. Bell, you needn't stop in for me. I know Franks won't grudge me a half-hour for once, even on a week day."
Mrs. Stone soon quitted the cottage, but not till she had warned her visitor with raised finger and shake of the head, "Don't you bother my husband about anything to make his mind uneasy."
When she had closed the door behind her, Ben Stone turned to Franks, and said, "I was looking over old papers, yesterday, which reminded me of my boyhood, and I suppose it's that which has brought back to me a bit of rhyme which I learned from my mother, and which has been running in my brain all this day, though it had gone clean out of my memory for years,—
"'There's not a sin that I commit, Or wicked word I say, But in Thy dreadful book 'tis writ Against the judgment-day.'
"Now, do you suppose," said Stone, with an effort to speak in his usual careless tone, "that God keeps an account like that, as a creditor with his debtors, and that when folks die there are all the old bills, as it were, brought up, even debts that they'd clean forgotten?"
"Yes, assuredly, unless all those debts have been paid."
"That's the very nail that I want you to hit," cried the carpenter. "How are we to make sure that the debts are all paid,—I mean, that God has forgiven us outright? Are you sure that your debts are all paid?"