"Very great indeed; but I hope brighter days will come. You know Walter will be back in less than two years."
"Two years!" said Maude. "That seems an age."
"So it does," answered Nellie; "but not so bad as three."
"Why, of course not; but I should always be afraid something would happen, and that he would never come."
"Don't, my dear," said her mother deprecatingly.
"But then," said Nellie, her eyes filling with tears, "if we thought of all those things, we should never be happy for a moment."
"That's just it," answered Maude; "if I had any thing I valued very much in life (which I haven't), I should be thinking all the time I should lose it."
"That would be dreadful," said Nellie; "but I think God is better to us than that."
"But, Nellie, people's best-loved ones do die sometimes," said Maude.
"Yes," she answered thoughtfully; "but don't you think, Mrs. Elliot, we cannot always understand what God does, and must wait?"