Since Father Mortimer gave me leave to love any one, any how, so long as I put God first, I thought I might say “darling” to Margaret. She smiled,—I fancied she looked a little surprised—and coming forward, she knelt down at my feet, in her favourite attitude, and laid her clasped hands in my lap.
“Is there some trouble, Margaret?”
“No, dear Annora. Only little worries which make one feel tired out: nothing to be properly called trouble. I am working under Mother Ada this week, and—well, you know what she is. I do not wish to speak evil of any one: only—sometimes, one feels tired. So I thought it would help me to have a little talk with my sister Annora. Art thou weary too?”
“I think I am rested, dear,” said I. “Father Mortimer has given me a word of counsel from Holy Writ, and it hath done me good.”
“He hath given me many an one,” she saith, with a smile that seemed half pleasure and half pain. “And I am trying to live by the light of the last I had—I know not if the words were Holy Writ or no, but I think the substance was—‘If Christ possess thee, then shalt thou inherit all things.’”
She was silent for a moment, with a look of far-away thought: and I was thinking that a hundred little worries might be as wearying and wearing as one greater trouble. Suddenly Margaret looked up with a laugh for which her eyes apologised.
“I could not help thinking,” she said, “that I hope ‘all things’ have a limit. To inherit Mother Ada’s temper would scarcely be a boon!”
“All good things,” said I.
“Yes, all good things,” she answered. “That must mean, all things that our Lord sees good for us—which may not be those that we see good for ourselves. But one thing we know—that if we be His, that must be, first of all, Himself—He with us here, we with Him hereafter. And next to that comes the promise that they which are Christ’s, with whom we have to part here, will be brought home with us when He cometh. There is no restriction on the companying of the Father’s children, when they are gathered together in the Father’s House.”
I knew what she saw. And I saw the dear grey eyes of my child Joan; but behind them, other eyes that mine have not beheld for fifty years, and that I shall see next—and then for ever—in the light of the Golden City. Softly I said— (Note 8.)