At the moment of final parting, Gregory merely took Annie's hand and looked into her eyes with an expression that caused them speedily to droop, tear-blinded.
To Hunting he had bowed his farewell in the parlor.
When the last object connected with his old home was hidden from his wistful, lingering gaze, he said, with the sorrow of one who watches the sod placed above the grave of his dearest, "So it all ends."
But when in his city apartments, which never before had seemed such a cheerless mockery of the idea of home, he opened the package Annie had given him—when he found a small, worn Bible, inscribed with the words, "To my dear little daughter Annie, from mother," and written beneath, in a child's hand, "I thank you, dear mother. I will read it every day"—he sprang up, and exclaimed it strongest feeling, "No, all has not ended yet."
When he became sufficiently calm he again took up the Bible, and found the leaves turned down at the 14th chapter of St. John, with the words, "Begin here."
He read, "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
"In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you."
"How sweetly—with what exquisite delicacy—she points me beyond the shadows of time!" he said, musingly. "I believe in God. I ever have. Then why not trust the 'Man of Sorrows,' who also must be God? Both Annie and her quaint old friend are right. He never turned one away who came sincerely. In Him who forgave the outcast and thief there glimmers hope for me. How thick the darkness as I look elsewhere. Lord Jesus," he cried, with a rush of tears, "I am palsied through sin: lift me up, that I may come to Thee."
Better for him that night than a glowing hearth with genial friends around it was Annie's Bible.
Looking at it fondly, he said, "It links me to her happy childhood before that false man came, and it may join me to her in the 'place' which God is preparing, when he who now deceives her is as far removed as sin."