“I believe I’ll go up and work for a couple of hours,” said Allison, “and then we’ll go out for a walk.”

“All right, lad.  I’ll be ready.”

Even after the strains of the violin sounded faintly from upstairs, accompanied by a rhythmic tread as Allison walked to and fro, Colonel Kent did not begin to cut the leaves.

Instead, he sat gazing into the fire, thinking.  Quite unconsciously, for years, he had been carrying a heavy burden—­the fear that Allison would marry and that his marriage would bring separation.  Now he was greatly reassured.  “And yet,” he thought, “there’s no telling what a woman may do.”

The sense that his work was done still haunted him, and, resolutely, he tried to push it aside.  “While there’s life, there’s work,” he said to himself.  He knew, however, as he had not known before, that Allison was past the need of his father, except for companionship.

The old house seemed familiar, yet as though it belonged to another life.  He remembered the building of it, when, with a girl’s golden head upon his shoulder, they had studied plans together far into the night.  As though it were yesterday, their delight at the real beginning came back.  There was another radiant hour, when the rough flooring for the first story was laid, and, with bare scantlings reared, skeleton-like, all around them, they actually went into their own house.

One by one, through the vanished years, he sought out the links that bound him to the past.  The day the bride came home from the honeymoon, and knelt, with him, upon the hearth-stone, to light their first fire together; the day she came to him, smiling, to whisper to him the secret that lay beneath her heart; the long waiting, half fearful and half sweet, then the hours of terror that made an eternity of a night, then the dawn, that brought the ultimate, unbroken peace which only God can change.

Over there, in front of the fireplace in the library, the little mother had lain in her last sleep.  The heavy scent of tuberoses, the rumble of wheels, the slow sound of many feet, and the tiny, wailing cry that followed them when he and she went out of their house together for the last time—­it all came back, but, mercifully, without pain.

Were it not for this divine forgetting, few of us could bear life.  One can recall only the fact of suffering, never the suffering itself.  When a sorrow is once healed, it leaves only a tender memory, to come back, perhaps, in many a twilight hour, with tears from which the bitterness has been distilled.

Slowly, too, by the wonderful magic of the years, unknown joys reveal themselves and stand before us, as though risen from the dead.  At such and such a time, we were happy, but we did not know it.  In the midst of sorrow, the joy comes back, not reproachfully, but to beckon us on, with clearer sight, to those which lie on the path beyond.

He remembered, too, that after the first sharp agony of bereavement was over; when he had learned that even Death does not deny Love, he had seemed to enter some mysterious fellowship.  Gradually, he became aware of the hidden griefs of others, and from many unsuspected sources came consolation.  Even those whom he had thought hard and cold cherished some holy of holies—­some sacred altar where a bruised heart had been healed and the bitterness taken away.