"We must leave it," said Mr. Person. "Experience will soon correct
what mistake is in his notion. It is not so very far wrong. You and I
must go from them one day: what is it but that the sky will fall down
on us, and our bodies will get up no more! He thinks the time nearer
at hand than for their sakes I hope it is; but nobody can tell."

Clare never associated the church where the awful thing took place,
with the church to which he went on Sundays. The time for it, he
imagined, came to everybody. To Clare, nothing ever _happened_. The
way out of the world was a church in a city set on a hill, and there
an earthquake was always ready.

The heart of his adoptive mother grew yet more tender toward him after
the coming of her own child. She was not quite sure that she did not
love him even more than Mary. She could not help the feeling that he
was a child of heaven sent out to nurse on the earth; and that it was
in reward for her care of him that her own darling was sent her. That
their love to the boy had something to do with the coming of the girl,
I believe myself, though what that something was, I do not precisely
understand.

She left him less often alone with the child. She would not have his
thoughts drawn to the church of the earthquake; neither would she have
the mournfulness of his sweet voice much in the ears of her baby. He
never sang in a minor key when any one was by, but always and solely
when the baby and he were alone together.



Chapter VII.