own ideas against his, it was to her as sacrilegious as if I
had lifted my hand against a king. I might have
capitulated--ought, I suppose, to have foregone everything!

"There is one thing, however, that gives me strange comfort.
At the last she had such dignity! Her silence seemed fine and
brave. She looked at us from a deep still peace as if, after
all her losing of the way, she had at last found it and
Herself. The search has carried her beyond our sight.

"Oh, we are so lonely, father and I. We silently accuse each
other. He thinks my reckless truth-telling destroyed her
timid spirit; I think his twenty-five years of tyranny did
it. We both know how she hated our rasping, and we hate it
ourselves. Yet, even at that hour when we stood beside her
bed and knew the end was coming, he and I were at sword's
points. What a hackneyed expression, but how terrible! Yes,
the hateful swords of our spirits, my point toward his breast
and his toward mine, gleamed there almost visibly above that
little tired creature. He wanted her for himself even to the
last: I wanted her for Truth--wanted her to walk up to God
dressed in her own soul-garments, not decked out in the rags
and tags of those father had tossed to her.

"She spoke only once. She had been dreaming, I suppose, and a
wonderful illuminated smile broke over her face. In the midst
of what seemed a sort of ecstasy, she looked up and saw
father watching her. She shivered away from him with one of
those apologetic gestures she so often used. 'It wasn't a
heavenly vision,' she said--she knew he wouldn't have