of those greater matters concerning the family which I have been
hungering after ever since I came into the house."

"I know it," she returned. "This hunger you speak of was partly the
cause of your fever, and it is in you, keeping you feverish and feeble
still; but for this, instead of being a prisoner here, you would now be
abroad, feeling the sun and wind on your face."

"And if you know that," I pleaded, "why do you not now impart the
knowledge that can make me whole? For surely, all those lesser
matters--those things suitable for one in my condition to know--can be
learned afterwards, in due time. For they are not of pressing
importance, but the other is to me a matter of life and death, if you
only knew it."

"I know everything," she returned quickly. But a cloud had come over her
face at my concluding words, and a startled look into her eyes. "Life
and death! do you know what you are saying?" she exclaimed, fixing her
eyes on me with such intense earnestness in them that mine fell abashed
before their gaze. Then, after a while, she drew my head down against
her knees, and spoke with a strange tenderness. "Do you then find it so
hard to exercise a little patience, my son, that you do not acquiesce in
what I say to you, and fear to trust your future in my hands? My time is
short for all that I have to do, yet I also must be patient and wait,
although for me it is hardest. For now your coming, which I did not
regard at first, seeing in you only a pilgrim like others--one who
through accidents of travel had been cast away and left homeless in the
world, until we found and gave you shelter--now, it has brought
something new into my life: and if this fresh hope, which is only an
old, perished hope born again, ever finds fulfillment, then death will