"Not much, dear. The future has cleared itself; that's all."
"The future?"
"I cannot struggle any longer, Ellen. I have preached faith and patience to others, but they seem to have deserted me. I--I almost think the very strife itself is helping on the end."
Sharp though the pang was, that pierced her breast, she would not show it. Miss Nelly chattered below, asking questions of her doll, and making believe to answer.
"The----end, Hamish!"
He took her hand and looked straight in her face as she stood by him. "Have you not seen it, Ellen?"
With a heart and bosom that alike quivered,--with a standing still of all her pulses,--with a catching-up of breath, as a sob, Mrs. Churning was conscious of a stab of pain. Oh yes--yes--she had seen it; and the persuading herself that she had not, had been but a sickly, miserable pretence at cheating.
"But for leaving you and the little one, Ellen, there would be no strife," he whispered, letting his forehead rest for a moment on her arm. "It is a long while now that my dreams--I had almost said my visions--have been of that world to which we are all journeying, which every one of us must enter sooner or later. There will be no pain, or trouble, or weariness there. Only the other night, as I lay between sleep and wake, I seemed to have passed its portals into a soft, bright, soothing light, a haven of joyous peace and rest."
"And if dolly's good, and does not spoil her new blue frock, she shall go out for a walk," was heard from the hearthrug. Hamish put his elbow on the arm of the chair, and covered his face with his slender fingers.
"But when I think of my wife and child--and I am always thinking of them, Ellen,--when I realize the bitter truth that I must leave them, why then at times it seems as if my heart must break with its intense pain. Ellen, my darling, I would not, even yet, have spoken, but that I know you must have been waiting for it."