Yet one or two things were becoming daily more clear. One was, that in any perfect scheme a future life was necessary to the completion of this. Another was, that human life, if only because of its relationships and possibilities, was a more sacred thing than he at one time had been willing to grant. And a third was, that love was not a mere physical or mental affinity. It was something that went farther and struck deeper. It was a soul relation that remained untouched and independent of time and change.
He had not seen Madeline Grover for considerably more than two months. No message or whisper had passed between them. In the chances of human life he knew that he might never speak to her again. Yet his love remained fixed and unshaken. It was not something that he had put on as an extra garment, and that in the wear and tear of life he might lose again. It was part of himself—woven into the fibre of his being.
Perhaps his love for Madeline, more than anything else, made him think of the problem of immortality. Whittier had said:
Life is ever Lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own.
How well he remembered that afternoon when Madeline read "Snow-Bound" to him, in which these lines occurred. He had never been able to get them out of his mind since. They had followed him like a haunting echo of something long forgotten, had stirred his heart with a thousand vague hopes and dreams.
If Love could never lose its own, Madeline might yet be his. In some far-away region beyond the reach of human vision, beyond the stress and passion of earth, beyond the darkness and the doubting, beyond the ravages of time and trouble, they might meet again—the soul finding its mate and life its eternal complement.
Madeline had a habit of marking with a pencil the passages in a book she liked, and in one of the volumes she left behind he found these words marked with a double line down the margin:
I sometimes think that heaven will be
A green place and an orchard tree,
And one sweet Angel known to me.
Could he have put his wildest dreams and longings into words, nothing could have fitted better. It expressed all the heaven he wanted—all the beauty, and all the companionship his soul desired.