“But I don’t want to think of that,” Joan answered quickly. “Mother often makes herself miserable, thinking how the years are going, and how one’s happiness has to come to an end by-and-by. But I don’t see the use. It only makes one wretched, like those beautiful sad lines you read to us here, the other day. I wish you had not, for I can’t forget them.”
“Ay,” George said—
“‘Come thou must, and we must die:
Jesus, Saviour, stand thou by
When that last sleep seals our eye.’”
“Still, one needn’t be always thinking about it,” said Joan. “What must be, must, but I would rather enjoy things as they are. And I like to feel that life will go on a long, long while yet. By-and-by, of course—but when one gets old and tired, perhaps one wouldn’t mind so much—”
“The call doesn’t always wait till we are very old and tired, my Joan,” George said quietly, as they began to walk towards the old gray church. “If one may have to take a sudden journey, at any hour or moment of one’s life, it is well to have things in readiness.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Joan said, in a calm uninterested voice. “But somehow it never seems as if one really might die at any time. I suppose I know it, but I don’t believe it; I always do expect to live long. People are very different in that way. Nessie often expects something to happen to her; and if she is ill she thinks of danger directly. I never do. And mother counts the years, and fancies coming changes, and dreads losing every one that she loves. It is odd how unlike we all are to one another—especially you and mother. I suppose mother really loves God, doesn’t she?—but she does not at all want to go to him. She has such a dread of life coming to end. And you never seem to think of death as sad at all; and you don’t mind about little fidgets and worries in this world, as most people do. Sometimes I feel as if you had had a little peep into heaven, which had made you quite different from everybody else for all the rest of your life.”
No disclaimer came, as Joan half expected, George only said—
“Would not you like such a peep, Joan?”