God's truth is not a complex thing, difficult to explain and hard to demonstrate; it is simple and natural. Health is the natural condition; sickness is abnormal. Righteousness is the simple state of man; sin is a distortion. But to live and demonstrate these truths in this many-sided, complex life requires all the wisdom that Christ came to earth to teach.
Mrs. Thorpe never doubted that could the saving power of Truth be revealed to her husband his infirmities would fall from him; yet with this message warm in her heart she had not broken the silence that lay between them. In this course that she had taken she had shielded herself behind the conviction that her husband would not accept this message; and she had put back with a quieting touch, hushed and kept asleep that which all the time had been to her so patent--that she was deceiving her husband--afraid to make known to him her new conception of the Christ-love and its transforming power.
Mr. Thorpe was in his study one morning, sorting and arranging his books. The disease from which he was suffering has been known to play with its victims as a cat delights to play with a mouse, and this was one of the times when Mr. Thorpe fully believed that he was to regain his health. He was finding great pleasure in his books this morning; he had been away from them so long that now as he handled them they seemed to him like dearest friends. Mrs. Thorpe tapped at the door of the study and he bade her enter.
"It seems good to find you here, Maurice," she said; "like old times again."
"Old times!" How the thought stirred his spirit--the time when there was no barrier between them. The sunshine streamed through the window and lay, a golden bar, on the floor; symbolic, he thought, of the barrier that had insinuated itself between him and this fair, smiling woman who stood before him; a barrier silent, far-reaching, heaven-high.
Mrs. Thorpe's eyes also were on the shaft of light.
"See how the sunshine lies like a bridge between us," she said; "a beautiful golden bridge. I hope I may be able to build as fair a one, Maurice, between your confidence and mine. I have been keeping something from you. I wish to talk to you about it--about the new belief--the light that has come to me."
Her heart was beating tumultuously. Her hand rested on a table beside her husband and he noticed the firm, white flesh of her arm, where once pitiful emaciation had marked it. He looked into her face and saw the signs of health and vigor there--evidence that she had cast her lot with some foreign power--some ungodly fetish!
"Evelyn," he said, "I have not questioned your belief nor demanded an explanation concerning this new, strange doctrine which you have embraced."
"No," she said, "you have not questioned nor demanded. I feel that you have trusted me, you have been kind--"