"It was time for them to be going."
Clayton expressed his intention of remaining over the night, to afford encouragement and assistance to his friends, in case of any further emergency.
CHAPTER XLIX. MORE VIOLENCE.
Clayton rose the next morning, and found his friends much better than he had expected after the agitation and abuse of the night before. They seemed composed and cheerful.
"I am surprised," he said, "to see that your wife is able to be up this morning."
"They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength," said father Dickson. "How often I have found it so! We have seen times when I and my wife have both been so ill that we scarcely thought we had strength to help ourselves; and a child has been taken ill, or some other emergency has occurred that called for immediate exertion, and we have been to the Lord and found strength. Our way has been hedged up many a time—the sea before us and the Egyptians behind us; but the sea has always opened when we have stretched our hands to the Lord. I have never sought the Lord in vain. He has allowed great troubles to come upon us; but he always delivers us."
Clayton recalled the sneering, faithless, brilliant Frank Russel, and compared him, in his own mind, with the simple, honest man before him.
"No," he said to himself, "human nature is not a humbug, after all. There are some real men—some who will not acquiesce in what is successful, if it be wrong."