The young man stopped in his walk and faced the other. “Strength!” he cried, almost fiercely. “To do without the things that make everything else worth having! Where is one to get it? You could hunt for work—I’d take my chances on finding that—but this!”
He set his teeth hard, and the preacher felt the strong young figure grow tense under his hand. He drew himself up, and his eyes held the boy’s with a compelling earnestness.
“Where are you to get it, Mort?” he said solemnly. “From the One that gave you what strength you’ve got. Do you think He bankrupted Himself giving you and me the little sense, the little power that’s in us? I tell you there’s more; there’s enough for every soul of us. Cry to Him for it. Open your eyes and open your heart. It’s here, it’s there, it’s all around us. And it’s ours for the having.”
He stretched out his arms as he spoke with a wide reverent gesture, and his plain awkward face looked noble as he lifted it toward the sky.
They stood together for a long still minute without speaking. He had broken in upon an hour of solitary wrestling; the older man knew it, and he shrank back now from his intrusion. Suddenly he turned away. “It’s a little shorter for me across the fields, Mort, and I’ll leave you here,” he said. “Good night, and God bless you.”
It was past midnight when Morton Elwell opened the door of his uncle’s house. A light was burning in the sitting room; and his aunt rose as he entered, dropping from her lap the work with which she had been filling the time while she waited.
“What, were you sitting up for me, Aunt Jenny?” he said, as she met him.
“It’s a long time since I had a chance to sit up for you, Mort,” she said tenderly. And then she added, with a gentle reproach in her voice, “Don’t you think you ought to be taking a little more rest to-night, when you start so early to-morrow?”
“I’m going to bed right now,” he said. Then he put his arm around her neck in the old affectionate way, as he added, “A fellow has a deal to be thankful for that’s had such an auntie as you are to take care of him all these years.”
And with that manly word, and a little quiver at his lips, he mounted the stairs to his own room.