“Will you keep your father waiting?” he asked. But he said it as if it were an afterthought, and rather uncertainly.
After that he disappeared, but where she could not tell.
So there was nothing to do but to get up again and go on alone.
Presently the road seemed to grow worse still, and it seemed as if it would never end.
“Why am I coming?” she kept saying to herself. “No one told me I was coming for anything, and I’m beginning to think father can’t be here at all.”
And then in the darkest, weariest part the road bent suddenly to the right and there was father!
She was so pleased to see him that for the time she thought of nothing else.
But after a while she looked around, and there on one side she saw the forest, and behind him on the other a glorious, pure white light was streaming. What it was, or what its shape, she could not tell, but it was something like a cross, and then an altar.
And this meeting was full of happiness which had in it no pain.
Why, even as she stayed there he left her and went away to walk in the glorious garden beyond the light, but she scarcely felt the parting, and laughed and said, “Why, I’ve let father go;” and he answered,“No, I’m here. I walk here, whilst you walk in the shade.”