She opened the door in the closet, and Juliet started back with amazement. It was the loveliest room! and—like a marvel in a fairy-tale—the great round moon was shining gloriously, first through the upper branches of a large yew, and then through an oriel window, filled with lozenges of soft greenish glass, through which fell a lovely picture on the floor in light and shadow and something that was neither or both. Juliet turned in delight, threw her arms round Dorothy, and kissed her.
"I thought I was going into a dungeon," she said, "and it is a room for a princess!"
"I sometimes almost believe, Juliet," returned Dorothy, "that God will give us a great surprise one day."
Juliet was tired, and did not want to hear about God. If Dorothy had done all this, she thought, for the sake of reading her a good lesson, it spoiled it all. She did not understand the love that gives beyond the gift, that mantles over the cup and spills the wine into the spaces of eternal hope. The room was so delicious that she begged to be excused from going down to supper. Dorothy suggested it would not be gracious to her friends. Much as she respected, and indeed loved them, Juliet resented the word friends, but yielded.
The little two would themselves rather have gone home—it was so late—but staid, fearing to disappoint Dorothy. If they did run a risk by doing so, it was for a good reason—therefore of no great consequence.
"How your good father will delight to watch you here sometimes, Miss Drake," said Polwarth, "if those who are gone are permitted to see, walking themselves unseen."
Juliet shuddered. Dorothy's father not two months gone and the dreadful little man to talk to her like that!
"Do you then think," said Dorothy, "that the dead only seem to have gone from us?" and her eyes looked like store-houses of holy questions.
"I know so little," he answered, "that I dare hardly say I think any thing. But if, as our Lord implies, there be no such thing as that which the change appears to us—nothing like that we are thinking of when we call it death—may it not be that, obstinate as is the appearance of separation, there is, notwithstanding, none of it?—I don't care, mind: His will is, and that is every thing. But there can be no harm, where I do not know His will, in venturing a may be. I am sure He likes His little ones to tell their fancies in the dimmits about the nursery fire. Our souls yearning after light of any sort must be a pleasure to him to watch.—But on the other hand, to resume the subject, it may be that, as it is good for us to miss them in the body that we may the better find them in the spirit, so it may be good for them also to miss our bodies that they may find our spirits."
"But," suggested Ruth, "they had that kind of discipline while yet on earth, in the death of those who went before them; and so another sort might be better for them now. Might it not be more of a discipline for them to see, in those left behind, how they themselves, from lack of faith, went groping about in the dark, while crowds all about them knew perfectly what they could not bring themselves to believe?"