"Such proportion as the seed sustains to the mature plant, the ovum to the living, moving creature, you will tell me—" Dr. Baxter was saying, when she again lent attention to his dissertation. "I grant it. But like produces like in vegetable and animal generation, and why deny the spiritual analogy? What we call Death is but the threshold—and a narrow one—separating the vestibule from the temple. It is all one building—the Life which God has given. When I cast off the cumbrous shell I have borne so long that I foolishly fancy it is myself—a part of my being without which I should be naked, shivering, and helpless; when it slips from my soul by reason of its own weight and rottenness, I shall enter upon no new existence. It will be I still—not a different creation. For a moment, perhaps, I may not know what has happened. Thus, I have seen a butterfly trembling with the strangeness of his position, clinging with damp, untried wings to the bough that supports the little pendant coffin, now broken—from which he has just crept. A delicious sense of liberty and space there may be as one breathes more freely in leaving a close room for the outer air. I shall miss the incubus of the body, and the fleshly desires I have sloughed off with it. Then will dawn upon me gradually—as I have strength to bear the revelation, that I have passed! Not been made over, mark you! We are nowhere taught that regeneration is a posthumous experience. 'He is gone!' some one will say. And perhaps another—'He is dead!'
"Dead! I tell you, my friend, I shall be the livest man in that room! Not until that hour of glorious emancipation shall I know what life is!"
There was an interval of stillness. Jessie had staggered to her feet. Her eyes, no longer blank, were dilated with intensest and eager inquiry. What did it signify—this talk of death and the life to come? Who was the speaker's companion? Her father? Oh, why did he not speak?
Another voice, deeper and sweeter, made reverent response:
"Thanks be to God, for His unspeakable gift!"
She flung the door widely open; faced the astonished man with the demand, shrieked, rather than spoken:
"Where is he? He said that! my father! Where is he now?"
"Jessie, love!"
Roy caught her in his arms, but she pushed him from her.
"I will know! I am going mad! Where is my father?"