"Yes; that's true. The boy was more like his uncle than his father. I only saw Mr. James Waring once or twice, and I always distrusted him. Well, as I was saying, Harold Waring's face was beautiful with hope and happiness. 'We shall have a home, Mrs. Beaton,' he said; 'we shall have a home!'"
"That hope was never realised!" sighed Elsie.
Mrs. Beaton's look was very bright.
"Don't you think that it is realised now?" she asked. "I have often fancied that it is the want unanswered here which is most fully satisfied hereafter. It makes the new life all the fresher and sweeter, you see. They wanted a home; but home is not a place, it is a state. There can be no home at all if there is not that mystical house, 'not made with hands,' where spirits blend and dwell together for ever."
Just then the parlour-door opened quietly, and Andrew Beaton came into the room. "Mother is giving you some of her notions," he said. "She says that all the joys of heaven must first have had their beginnings in our souls on earth."
"'To him that hath, shall be given,'" the old lady quoted. "Miss Kilner, I'm afraid you find me very wearisome, my dear. You wanted to hear about Meta Neale's life in this world, and I am trying to talk about her life in the next. Forgive a foolish old woman, who sits and dreams over her fire."
It was pleasant to see the look in Andrew's eyes when his mother called herself a foolish old woman. His glance had flatly contradicted her statement before Elsie spoke.
"Mrs. Beaton," she said earnestly, "I like to hear your notions. You have done me good. I have been thinking a great deal too much lately about the things that are temporal. There were no spiritual influences in my Sussex home," she added, with a sigh.
"One ought to look up sometimes," said Andrew; "but one mustn't forget the story of that great artist who was painting the ceiling of a chapel for two years. He got into such a confirmed habit of looking up that it cost him a mighty effort to look down at the common ground he had to walk on."
Mrs. Beaton poured out tea for her son, and smiled at Elsie across the table. It was a humble home at the back of a London shop, but Elsie found here the thought and refinement which she had so often missed in other houses. She remembered the prattle which usually accompanied the clatter of afternoon teacups, and the bits of scandal handed round with the cake.