“Tell me,” he muttered, involuntarily, “whence comes this peace!”
“From God, as I feel him in my soul—as I read of Him in the revelation of his Word.”
Harold was silent. His aspect of hopeless misery went to Olive's heart.
“Oh that I could give to you this peace—this faith!”
“Alas! if I knew what reason you have for yours.”
Olive paused. An awful thing it was, with the dead lying in the chamber above, to wrestle with the unbelief of the living. But it seemed as if the spirit of her mother had passed into her spirit, giving her strength to speak with words not her own. What if, in the inscrutable purposes of Heaven, this hour of death was to be to him an hour of new birth?
So, repressing all grief and weakness, Olive said, “Let us talk a little of the things which in times like this come home to us as the only realities.”
“To you, not to me! You forget the gulf between us!”
“Nay,” Olive said, earnestly; “you believe, as I do, in one God—the Creator and Ruler of this world?”
Harold made solemn assent.