第78章

I believe we owe it to this constant prayer that we have loved each other so uniformly and with such growing comfort in each other; so that our little discords always have ended in fresh accord, and our love has felt conscious of resting on a rock and that that rock was the will of God.""It is plain, then," said Helen, "that you and Ernest are sure of one source of happiness as long as you live, whatever vicissitudes you may meet with.I thank you so much for what you have said.The fact is you have been brought up to carry religion into everything.But Iwas not.~ My mother was as good as she was lovely, but I think she felt and taught us to feel, that we were to put it on as we did our Sunday clothes, and to wear it, as we did them, carefully and reverently, but with pretty long, grave faces.But you mix everything up so, that when I am with you I never know whether you are most like or most unlike other people.And your mother is just so.""But you forget that it is to Ernest I owe my best ideas about married life; I don't remember ever talking with my mother or any one else on the subject.And as to carrying religion into everything, how can one help it if one's religion is a vital part of one's self, not a cloak put on to go to church in and hang up out of the way against next Sunday?"Helen laughed.She has the merriest, yet gentlest little laugh one can imagine.I long to know who it is that has been so fortunate as to touch her heart!

MARCH.-I know now, and glad I am! The sly little puss is purring at this moment in James' arms; at least I suppose she is, as I have discreetly come up to my room and left them to themselves So it seems I have had all these worries about Lucy for naught.What made her so fond of James was simply the fact that a friend of his had looked on her with a favorable eye, regarding her as a very proper mother for four or five children who are in need of a shepherd.Yes, Lucy is going to marry a man so much older than herself, that on a pinch he might have been her father.She does it from a sense of duty, she says, and to a nature like hers duty may perhaps suffice, and no cry of the heart have to be stifled in its performance.We are all so happy in the happiness of James and Helen that we are not in the mood to criticise Lucy's decision.I have a strange and most absurd envy when I think what a good time they are having at this moment downstairs, while I sit here alone, vainly wishing I could see more of Ernest.Just as if my happiness were not a deeper, more blessed one than theirs which must be purged of much dross before it will prove itself to be like fine gold.Yes, I suppose I am as happy in my dear, precious husband and children as a wife and mother can be in a world, which must not be a real heaven lest we should love the land we journey through so well as to want to pitch our tents in it forever, and cease to look and long for the home whither we are bound.

James will be married almost immediately, I suppose, as he sails for Syria early in April.How much a missionary and his wife must be to each other, when, severing themselves from all they ever loved before, they go forth, hand in hand, not merely to be foreigners in heathen lands, but to be henceforth strangers in their own should they ever return to it!

Helen says, playfully, that she has not a missionary spirit, and is not at all sure that she shall go with James.But I don't think that he feels very anxious on that point!

MARCH.-It does one's heart good to see how happy they are! And it does one's heart good to have one's husband set up an opposition to the goings on by behaving like a lover himself.