"I can take up my burden and go on until the road divides, and the Grey Angel leads me down your path. I can be kind. I can try, each day, to put joy into the world that so sorely needs it, and to take nothing away from whatever it holds of happiness now. I can be strong because I have known you, I can have courage because you were brave, I can be true because you were true, I can be tender because I love you.
"At last I understand. It is passion that cries out for continual assurance, for fresh sacrifices, for new proof. Love needs nothing but itself; it asks for nothing but to give itself; it denies nothing, neither barriers nor the grave. Love can wait until life comes to its end, and trust to eternity, because it is of God."
A Man's Heart
Roger put the little book down and wiped his eyes. He had come upon a man's heart laid bare and was thrilled to the depths by the revelation. He was as one who stands in a holy place, with uncovered head, in the hush that follows prayer.
In the midst of his tenderness for his dead father welled up a passionate loyalty toward the woman who slept in the room adjoining the library, whose soul had "never been welded." She had known life no more than a prattling brook in a meadow may know the sea. Bound in shallows, she knew nothing of the unutterable vastness in which deep answered unto deep; tide and tempest and blue surges were fraught with no meaning for her.
The clock struck twelve and Roger still sat there, with his head resting upon his hand. He read once more his father's wish to bequeath to him his love, "with no barrier to divide it from its desire."
Hedged in by earth and hopelessly put asunder, could it at last come to fulfilment through daughter and son? At the thought his heart swelled with a pure passion all its own—the eager pulse-beats owed nothing to the dead.
Out into the Night