It was all very well to read of it in the Bible, because that concerned
a by-gone day, or even to hear a clergyman preach of it, this belonged
to his office; but when this old man, with his white beard, talked to
her and her husband just as David had talked in some of his psalms, she
was afraid, and found his aspiration worse to her than any amount of
exhortation could have been.

What so impossible to thought as such a longing for intercourse with the
awful and the remote--"With my soul have I desired thee in the night;"
"My soul is athirst for God;" no, not so, says the listener who stands
without--I will come to his house and make obeisance, but let me
withdraw soon again from his presence, and dwell undaunted among my
peers.

There is, indeed, nothing concerning which people more fully feel that
they cannot away with it than another man's aspiration.

And her husband liked it. He was not afraid, as she was, of the old
man's prayers, though he fully believed they would be answered.

He tried to be loyal to the light he walked in, and his father rested in
a trust concerning him and his, which had almost the assurance of
possession.

She also, in the course of a few years, came to believe that she must
ere long be drawn into a light which as yet had not risen. She feared it
less, but never reached the point of wishing to see it shine.

At varying intervals, Mrs. John Mortimer presented her husband with
another lovely and healthy infant, and she also, in her turn, received a