"Their life goes on in other lives"—the thought finds a home in Hildeguard's mind. When, soon after, the little Quakeress dies, Hildeguard, looking at the quiet face, says to herself: "Dear little woman! So you have got your future." But in her own case she does not wait for death to bring it to her; she faces her problems, and, refusing to be swamped by them, makes the currents carry her bark along to the free, open sea. She flings herself whole-heartedly into causes whose hopes rest in the future. She draws around her children, who need her love and care, and makes them her hostages for the future. In all this we see Elsie Inglis describing a stage in her own life.
But before the story brings us round again to Christmas, something else has helped to change the outlook for Hildeguard; she has found herself in relation to God. Her religion is no merely inherited thing—not hers at second-hand, this "link with God." It is a real thing to her, found for herself, made part of herself, and so her sure foundation. It has come to her in a flash, a never-to-be-forgotten illumination of the words: "The Power of an Endless Life." She faces life now glad and free.
In her "den" on that Christmas Eve she is described thus to us by Elsie Inglis:
"Ann had put holly berries over the pictures, and the mantelpiece, too, was covered with it. Between the masses of green and the red berries stood the solid, old-fashioned, gilt frames of long ago, the photographs in them becoming yellow with age. Hildeguard turned to them from the portraits on the walls. She stood, her hands resting on the edge of the mantelpiece. Then suddenly it came to her that her whole attitude towards life and death had altered. For long these old photographs had stood to her as symbols of a past glowing with happiness. Though the pain still lingered even after time had dulled the edge, yet the old pictures typified all that was best in life, and the dim mist of the years rose up between the good days and her.
"But now, as she looked, her thoughts did not turn to the past. In some unexplained way the loves of long ago seemed to be entwined with a future so wonderful and so enticing that her heart bounded as she thought of it.
"'Grow old along with me;
The best is yet to be.'
"Only last Christmas those words would have meant nothing to her. Then her bark seemed to be stranded among shallows. She felt that she was an old woman, and 'second bests' her lot in the coming years. There could never be any life equal to the old life, in the back-water into which she had drifted.
"But to-day how different the outlook! Her ship was flying over a sunlit sea, the good wind bulging out the canvas. She felt the thrill of excitement and adventure in her veins as she stood at the helm and gazed across the dancing water. It seemed to her as if she had been asleep and the "Celestial Surgeon" had come and 'stabbed her spirit broad awake.' Joy had done its work, and sorrow; responsibility had come with its stimulating spur, and the ardent delight of battle in a great crusade. New powers she had discovered in herself, new possibilities in the world around her. She was ready for her 'adventure brave and new.' Rabbi Ben Ezra had waited for death to open the gate to it, but to Hildeguard it seemed that she was in the midst of it now, that 'adventure brave and new' in which death itself was also an adventure.
"'The Power of an Endless Life'—the words seemed to hover around her, just eluding her grasp, just beyond her comprehension, yet something of their significance she seemed to catch. She remembered the flash of intuition as she stood beside Frances' newly-made grave, but she realized, her eyes on the old pictures, that it would take æons to understand all it meant, to exhaust all the wonder of the idea. She could only bring to it her undeveloped powers of thought and of imagination, but she knew that stretching away, hid in an inexpressible light, lay depths undreamt of. To her nineteenth-century intellect life could only mean evolution—life ever taking to itself new forms, developing itself in new ways. At the bed-rock of all her thought lay the consciousness of 'the Power not ourselves, which makes for Righteousness.'
"No mystic she, to whom an ineffable union with the Highest was the goal of all. Never even distantly did she reach to that idea. Rather she was one of God's simple-hearted soldiers, who took her orders and stood to her post. The words thrilled her, not with the prospect of rest, but with the excitement of advance, 'an Endless Life' with ever new possibilities of growth and of achievement, ever greater battles to be fought for the right, and always new hopes of happiness. Doubtingly and hesitatingly she committed herself to the thought, conscious that it had been forming slowly and unregarded in the strenuous months that lay behind her, through the long years, ever since the first seemingly hopeless 'good-bye' had wrung her heart. She began dimly to feel the 'power' of the idea, the life of which she was the holder, only 'part of a greater whole.' Earth itself only a step in a great progression. Ever upward, ever onward, marching towards some 'Divine far-off event, to which the whole creation moves.'"
If another pen than Elsie Inglis's had drawn the picture we should have said it was one of herself. Surely she was able to weave around her heroine, from the depth of her own inner experiences of solved problems, the mantle of joy and freedom with which she herself was clothed.
The causes to which Elsie Inglis became a tower of strength; the "nation she twice saved from despair"; the many children, not only those in her own connection, on whom she lavished love and care, are the witnesses to-day of the completeness and the splendour of her power to mould each adverse circumstance in her life and make it yield a great advantage.