“Great-aunt Margaret’s been dead fifty years,” wept Mrs. Will Werrit.
So death led Mrs. Werrit most tenderly—as he does the very old—through the land of youth to the land of Unknown Peace.
“I wish,” said Mrs. Tom Werrit, bidding Andy good-bye, “that I’d made her a plum-cake yesterday. I knew she couldn’t eat it if I did, but she seemed to want one such as they used to have at Gaythorpe Feast when she was young. I wish I’d made it!”
“You were very good to her,” was all Andy found to say.
For he had often heard already, and had felt once in his own heart, that terrible, hopeless cry of the bereaved—“Come back and let us be kind.”
He walked home very gravely through the early freshness of the morning, and the great things of life—love, birth, death, and faith in God—began to take their right places in his soul.
He had been going to preach on the next Sunday morning upon the Evidences of Immortality, but he changed his mind upon that homeward walk. He actually felt the subject was too big for him.
CHAPTER VII
Andy did not feel inclined to go to bed when he got home, and so had a bath and went to work in the garden. He was not what you would call a sentimental gardener, and only weeded the herbaceous border because it was full of weeds, and he had invited the Attertons and the Stamfords to luncheon on the following day—so, of course, he wished everything to be perfect before it greeted the eyes of the Perfect Lady.