“They were all laid in the quiet churchyard within a week of each other. The sickness declined amongst us from that day; and only the many new mounds in the graveyard and the empty chairs around many hearths were left to tell the tale of that terrible time.
“I was left alone in my home—quite alone; for in my despair I found that what I had taken to be my love of God and trust in Him was all an illusion, a shadow that vanished away the moment my prosperity was overthrown. God was showing me the true worth of those things in which I had put my trust. He was showing me that I had never known Him truly all my life long. I was not quick to learn the lesson He was teaching me. Trouble hardened my heart, and in my thoughts I reviled the God who had taken away all that made the happiness of my life and had left me alone in misery and darkness. For a long time I was very, very unhappy.
“At last, in the days of my darkness and misery, God sent me a message of comfort. He sent it me by the hand of my dead wife—in a few words she had pencilled on the fly-leaf of her Bible, only a few hours before her death, and which it was months before I found courage to read.
“‘God will be with you always, my dear husband,’ she wrote. ‘His Holy Spirit will be your support and stay in all trials, and will lead you to the eternal home in our Father’s own good time—’ The pencil had evidently dropped from her fingers then; but she had told me enough.
“‘Lord, give to me the guidance of Thy Holy Spirit,’ was my daily prayer, when once the hardness of my heart was melted, and I had sought my Saviour’s forgiveness and pardoning love. That prayer was not uttered in vain. In His own good time God sent His Comforter to me; and I trust that I have learned the lesson He taught me during those dark and desolate days. We are always failing, always slipping, always needing new lessons and new strength to learn them; but I think there is one great life-long lesson that I shall not have to learn again.
“When I had learned it first, I put upon the marble slab over the grave that held my all the words I have never since wished unsaid—‘Thy will be done.’”
CHAPTER XIX.
COMING CHANGES.
SO the winter days wore happily away, the bond between the Squire and his little adopted son growing ever stronger and stronger; and by slow yet sure degrees the sunshine began to take the golden radiance of spring, the buds upon the bare trees swelled with the stirring life within them, the hedges showed a filmy network of tender green, and the shy wild flowers began to peep out from sheltered sunny corners, smiling up at the sunshine from beneath the protecting roots of great trees, or nodding their heads in friendly greeting to passers-by from cosey nooks in the south slope of a sheltered bank.