The more there was said about her husband, the
more there was done for him, surely the safer he would be. It was poor
Lisbeth's blind way of feeling that human love and pity are a ground of
faith in some other love. Seth, who was easily touched, shed tears, and
tried to recall, as he had done continually since his father's death,
all that he had heard of the possibility that a single moment of
consciousness at the last might be a moment of pardon and reconcilement;
for was it not written in the very psalm they were singing that the
Divine dealings were not measured and circumscribed by time? Adam had
never been unable to join in a psalm before. He had known plenty of
trouble and vexation since he had been a lad, but this was the first
sorrow that had hemmed in his voice, and strangely enough it was sorrow
because the chief source of his past trouble and vexation was for ever
gone out of his reach. He had not been able to press his father's
hand before their parting, and say, "Father, you know it was all right
between us; I never forgot what I owed you when I was a lad; you forgive
me if I have been too hot and hasty now and then!" Adam thought but
little to-day of the hard work and the earnings he had spent on his
father: his thoughts ran constantly on what the old man's feelings had
been in moments of humiliation, when he had held down his head before
the rebukes of his son.
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