They were walking up a hill, a sort of ravine with steep high banks on either side, and stately pines stretching their blue-green foliage up against the evening sky. A red glow of sunset made the dark stems look like fiery pillars, and presently as they reached the brow of the hill the great crimson globe was revealed to them. They both stood in perfect silence watching till it sunk below the horizon.
And a great peace filled Erica's heart though at one time her father's wish would have made her sad and apprehensive. In former times she had set her whole heart on his learning before death that he was teaching error. Now she had learned to add to “Thy will be done,” the clause which it takes some of us a life time to say, “Not my will.”
CHAPTER XXXIX. Ashborough
There's a brave fellow!
There's a man of pluck!
A man who is not afraid to say his say,
Though a whole town's against him.
Longfellow
A man's love is the measure of his fitness for good or bad
company here or elsewhere. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The week at Oakdene proved in every way a success; Raeburn liked his host heartily, and the whole atmosphere of the house was a revelation to him. The last morning there had been a little clouded for news had reached them of a terrible colliery accident in the north of England. The calamity had a special gloom about it for it might very easily have been prevented, the owners having long known that the mine was unsafe.
“I must say it is a little hard to see how such a horrible sin as carelessness of the lives of human beings can ever bring about the greater good which we believe evil to do,” said Erica, as she took her last walk in the wood with Donovan.
“'Tis hard to see at the time,” he replied. “But I am convinced that it is so. The sin is never good, never right; but when men will sin, then the result of the sin, however frightful, brings about more good that the perseverance in sin with no catastrophe would have done. A longer-deferred good, of course, than the good which would have resulted by adhering from the first to the right, and so far inferior.”
“Of course,” said Erica, “I can see that a certain amount of immediate good may result from this disaster. It will make the owners of other mines more careful.”
“And what of the hundred unseen workings that will result from it?” said Donovan, smiling. “In the first shock of horror one can not even glimpse the larger view, but later on—”