"So Grace tells me. Yes, I will be patient, and wait till He has done
His work. I am more patient now; am I not, Grace?" And she fondled
Grace's hand, and looked up in her face.
"Yes," said Grace, who was standing near, with downcast face, trying to avoid Tom's eye. "Yes, you are very good; but you must not talk:" but the girl went on, with kindling eye,—
"Ah—I was very fretful at first, because I could not go to heaven at once: but Grace showed me how it was good to be here, as well as there, as long as He thought that I might be made perfect by sufferings. And since then, my pain has become quite pleasant to me, and I am ready to wait and bear—wait and bear."
"You must not talk,—see, you are beginning to cough," said Tom, who wished somehow to stop a form of thought which so utterly puzzled him. Not that he had not heard it before; commonplace enough indeed it is, thank God: but that day the words came home to him with spirit and power, all the more solemnly from their contrast with the scene around—without, all sunshine, joy, and glory: all which could tempt a human being to linger here: and within, that young girl longing to leave it all, and yet content to stay and suffer. What mysteries there were in the human spirit—mysteries to which that knowledge of mankind on which he prided himself gave him no key!
"What if I were laid on my back to-morrow for life, by a fall, a blow, as I have seen many a better man than me;—should I not wish to have one to talk to me, as she was talking to that child?" And for a moment a yearning after Grace came over him, as it had done before, and swept from his mind the dark cloud of suspicion.
"Now I must talk with your mother," said he; "for you have better company than mine; and I hear her just coming in."
He settled little matters for his patient's comfort with the farmer's wife. When he returned to bid her good-bye Grace was gone.
"I hope I have not driven her away."
"Oh no; she had been here an hour, and she must go back now, to get her mother's supper."
"That is a good girl," said Tom, looking after her as she went down the field.