instead of dinner, and then when they would turn into their big, lamplit
parlor, and sit down for a long evening with his books. Sometimes he read
to her as she sewed, but he read mostly to himself, and he said he hadn't
had such a bath of poetry since he was a boy. Sometimes in the splendid
nights, which were so clear that you could catch the silver glint of the
gossamers in the thin air, he would go out and walk up and down the long
veranda. Once, when he coaxed her out with him, he took her under the arm
and walked her up and down, and he said: 'Isn't it like a ship? The earth
is like a ship, and we're sailing, sailing! Oh, I wonder where!' Then he
stopped with a sob, and she was startled, and asked him what the matter
was, but he couldn't tell her. She was more frightened than ever at what
seemed a break in his happiness. She was troubled about his reading the
Bible so much, especially the Old Testament; but he told her he had never
known before what majestic literature it was. There were some turns or
phrases in it that peculiarly took his fancy and seemed to feed it with
inexhaustible suggestion. 'The Angel of the Lord' was one of these. The
idea of a divine messenger, embodied and commissioned to intimate the
creative will to the creature: it was sublime, it was ineffable. He
wondered that men had ever come to think in any other terms of the living
law that we were under, and that could much less conceivably operate like
an insensate mechanism than it could reveal itself as a constant purpose.
He said he believed that in every great moral crisis, in every ordeal of
conscience, a man was aware of standing in the presence of something sent
to try him and test him, and that this something was the Angel of the
Lord.

"He went off that night, saying to himself, 'The Angel of the Lord, the
Angel of the Lord!' and when she lay a long time awake, waiting for him
to go to sleep, she heard him saying it again in his room. She thought he
might be dreaming, but when she went to him, he had his lamp lighted, and