‘You might take twenty affidavits of it if you chose, Anthony,’ said his sister; ‘but nobody would believe you with such eyes as those.’
‘It’s a world full of hearts,’ said the Doctor, hugging his youngest daughter, and bending across her to hug Grace—for he couldn’t separate the sisters; ‘and a serious world, with all its folly—even with mine, which was enough to have swamped the whole globe; and it is a world on which the sun never rises, but it looks upon a thousand bloodless battles that are some set-off against the miseries and wickedness of Battle-Fields; and it is a world we need be careful how we libel, Heaven forgive us, for it is a world of sacred mysteries, and its Creator only knows what lies beneath the surface of His lightest image!’
You would not be the better pleased with my rude pen, if it dissected and laid open to your view the transports of this family, long severed and now reunited. Therefore, I will not follow the poor Doctor through his humbled recollection of the sorrow he had had, when Marion was lost to him; nor, will I tell how serious he had found that world to be, in which some love, deep-anchored, is the portion of all human creatures; nor, how such a trifle as the absence of one little unit in the great absurd account, had stricken him to the ground. Nor, how, in compassion for his distress, his sister had, long ago, revealed the truth to him by slow degrees, and brought him to the knowledge of the heart of his self-banished daughter, and to that daughter’s side.
Nor, how Alfred Heathfield had been told the truth, too, in the course of that then current year; and Marion had seen him, and had promised him, as her brother, that on her birth-day, in the evening, Grace should know it from her lips at last.
‘I beg your pardon, Doctor,’ said Mr. Snitchey, looking into the orchard, ‘but have I liberty to come in?’
Without waiting for permission, he came straight to Marion, and kissed her hand, quite joyfully.
‘If Mr. Craggs had been alive, my dear Miss Marion,’ said Mr. Snitchey, ‘he would have had great interest in this occasion. It might have suggested to him, Mr. Alfred, that our life is not too easy perhaps: that, taken altogether, it will bear any little smoothing we can give it; but Mr. Craggs was a man who could endure to be convinced, sir. He was always open to conviction. If he were open to conviction, now, I—this is weakness. Mrs. Snitchey, my dear,’—at his summons that lady appeared from behind the door, ‘you are among old friends.’
Mrs. Snitchey having delivered her congratulations, took her husband aside.
‘One moment, Mr. Snitchey,’ said that lady. ‘It is not in my nature to rake up the ashes of the departed.’
‘No, my dear,’ returned her husband.