"I'm sure I don't know how!" said Roland, simply, "but I'm glad if it is so. I hope poor little Cecilia will be happy with him. She will be a wonderful comfort and interest to him, by and by."
"I think," said Nora, "that she really is getting to be a little fond of him. She was a great deal with him, while he was here, and he is making all sorts of plans for her education. Oh, I hope——"
Roland understood the thought which she did not express.
"I think," he said, quietly, "that she has enough of her father's self-contained nature to help to keep other things in check. We must hope for the best. But Mr. Chillingworth is certainly a greatly changed man. I heard him preach lately, and there was such a new note in him, less 'eloquence,' but much more of human sympathy! Well, we've all our limitations; and I've learned to see that 'The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small!' I can see that I've been too much in a hurry for results that must take time to bring about."
"Yes; that's a mistake that we are all apt to make, in some way," said Nora, with a sigh. "But some lines of Browning that I read, the other day, were quite a comfort to me, in thinking of our mistakes. Let me give them to you.
"'God's gift was that man should conceive of truth,
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach fact indeed.'"
"If we ever do!" replied Roland, sighing, in his turn. "But, even if it be only a 'midway help,' I can't help still hoping to see some reforms, like the 'eight-hours movement' and some other restrictive measures, carried out in my lifetime. The abolition of slavery looked much more hopeless, a generation or two ago!"
"But even these won't bring perfection and happiness, alone," said Nora, thoughtfully. "There must also be a higher moral ideal, and a higher strength in which to attain it."
"Oh, yes, I've learned that lesson," he replied, quickly. "I know that Law is not Love, nor the knowledge of right, alone, the power to reach it. I know, too, that, as Mr. Alden so often says, there's only one thing that can set this poor world really right, and that is, the growth of the brother-love! And that must come from the Source of Love. Yet, we must all help on, as far as we can. I take comfort in a thought I found in my Thoreau—'The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving them. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design, but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.'"
"'And still it moves!'" quoted Nora, softly; and there was a long silence, once more. And, in the quiet dusk of the August evening, the whippoorwill piped on untiring; as the world, after all, is always singing its old songs over again, if only our ears are not too dull or too tired to hear them.