"Don't try to, dear; only think how it is to him and to me now, when we are to have this short, this pitifully short space of time together--to have to take it in the face of such an outcry as will be made. When I creep back into life again, with my heart broken and my dress black always from then on, I shall be so notorious, such an object of curiosity for all time to come, that my friends will prefer not to be seen in public with me. When I think of my home-going to tell them, my very soul faints. My father abhors any form of physical deformity; what he is going to say to my marrying one who is so maimed and crushed that he can not use his right hand, I can't think. And then there is my mother, to whom sentiment and religion are alike quixotic. What will she say?"
She was silent, and then she suddenly left the rail and moved on.
"Ah, well, if it could only stay bright like this until we came back together! But that is impossible. What we shall see together will be the snow lying softly over all, and the brown, curving line of the tree-tops and the pink sunset glow in the west. He will lie in his chair and I shall sit on a cushion thrown close beside him, and with that one hand that they have left him pressed to my face, we shall look out over all the wide, still world and talk of that future which no one can bar us out of, except our own two selves. God can say 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant,' but He proves in the saying that the doing and the goodness and the faith all emanated from the one who served. Religion is such a grand thing, Lassie; I can't understand any one with intelligence choosing to be an atheist. And lately, since I have realized that the real trinity is two who love and their God, I have been overcome at the mysticism of what life really means. Oh, I'm truly very, very happy. As I look over these hills and valleys, I think how all my life long I shall be coming back here--not to weep, but to remember. I shall be left lonely to a degree that hardly any one can comprehend, because for me there will be no possible chance of any earthly consolation; but in another sense I shall never know grief at all, for I know, with the absolute knowledge that I have attained to, that grief like all other finite things is unreal, and that my happiness is eternal."