“The Herr Pastor was quite right, my boy. Your righteousness, and mine also, is as filthy rags compared with His, and compared also with the wedding garment in which we shall sit down to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And have I not told you that, as your faith grows, your salvation from sin grows also? I have not told you that you will ever be able to say that you believe in this world, because I have known of so many whose lives have acknowledged Him while their lips, to their latest breath, denied Him. Am I a poor comforter, Louis?” he added kindly, as the boy looked down and sighed.
“No, no; I was thinking of Dr. Richards. He is one of those men you spoke of, and, perhaps, never will believe as you do.”
“Frederick Richards is one of the bravest men I ever knew,” said Mr. Clare.
He was a very silent man for the next few days; also very gentle and tender towards all around him, especially his wife, whom he watched as she went about the house or sat at work beside him, with eyes of wistful comprehension. It was not until the week was nearly gone that she crept up to him one evening, in the early twilight, and silently laid her head upon his breast.
“Yes, my dear, yes,” he said tenderly. “I know all about it, Alice; there is little about yourself that you need to tell me in words, after all these years. But we had better not talk about it, I think; for I might say something to disturb your faith once more, and I should be sorry to do that.”
“I don’t think you could, now,” she replied. “It is no new thing, Fred; I think it has been growing within me for a long time. And it is not such faith as I thought I had once.”
“As you thought you had?”
“It was little more than thinking; I did not know what belief really meant. Oh, don’t say we must not talk about it, dear; I cannot bear any forbidden subjects between us now.”
He drew her nearer, and kissed her, smiling. “Now?” he asked gently.
“It seems as though I had never loved you until now,” she replied. “Years ago—oh, Fred, can you forgive me!—I believed, as I had been taught, that it was a sin to marry an infidel; but it would have killed me to give you up, and so I did what I thought wrong in defiance.”