How often he had heard the familiar words and music in that same home! They seemed to crown and complete all the memories of the place, but they reminded him more clearly than ever before that its most inseparable associations were holy, hopeful, and suggestive of a faith that he seemed to have lost as utterly as if it had been a gem dropped into the ocean.
He had lived in foreign lands far from his birthplace, but the purpose to return ever dwelt pleasurably in his mind. But how could he cross the gulf that yawned between him and the faith of his childhood? Was there really anything beyond that gulf save what the credulous imagination had created? Instinctively he felt that there was, for he was honest enough with himself to remember that his scepticism was the result of an evil life and the influence of an unbelieving world, rather than the outcome of patient investigation. The wish was father to the thought.
Yet sweet, unfaltering, and clear as the voice of faith ever should be, the hymn went forward in the room below, his memory supplying the well-known words that were lost from remoteness:—
"When mine eyelids close in death,
When I soar to worlds unknown."
"Oh, when!" he exclaimed, bitterly. "What shall be my experience then? If I continue to fail in health as I have of late I shall know cursedly soon. That must be Miss Walton singing. Though she does not realize it, to me this is almost as cruel mockery as if an angel sang at the gates of hell."
The music ceased, and the monotone of one reading followed.
"Family prayers as of old," he muttered. "How everything conspires to-day to bring my home-life back again! and yet there is a fatal lack of something that is harder to endure than the absence of my own kindred and vanished youth. I doubt whether I can stay here long after all. Will not the mocking fable of Tantalus be repeated constantly, as I see others drinking daily at a fountain which though apparently so near is ever beyond my reach?"
Shivering with the chill of the night and the deeper chill at heart, he retired to troubled sleep.