But he would say, fastening his wistful eyes upon her, with a look that always gave her pain: 

“I like best to have you tell me of heaven.  I do not believe I shall ever be happy in this world; but, I want to try and do right, so that when I die, I may go to live with God and his holy angels.”

“But you must not indulge in such a morbid state of feeling,” Clemence would say gravely.  “If your Heavenly Father sees fit to have you labor for Him upon earth, you should not murmur nor repine, but strive humbly for submission.  You may be sure that there is something for you yet to accomplish.  God witnesses your misery, and knows of your longing to go to Him; but, you are not yet prepared.  The discipline of life is needed to prove that you can deny yourself for the good of others.  You can show your trust in the loving hand that guides you, by striving to bear your present trials patiently, and in His own good time He will surely send relief.”

“Do you really think that?” was the oft repeated question, and the troubled eyes would scan Clemence’s face, till her own were filled with blinding drops.  “I try so hard to be good and patient, but I can’t hope for anything better.  Something seems to stop me, when I try to pray to be made useful in this world, and it comes right out of my heart to ask, instead, only to let me die.  Sometimes I have waited outside the graveyard, and watched a little spot under a shady tree, where no one ever goes, and I have thought how pleasant it would be to lie down there, with the daisies and violets to creep over me lovingly, and never wake again to any more pain.  I don’t think I would like to be happy, for you are not, dear Miss Graystone, and I don’t think some people are ever made to be.  I believe God means to make them feel how bad and wicked the world is, so they will want to leave it and go to Him.  Don’t you think He means that, when He tells us about there being no more sorrow nor crying in heaven?  Oh, dear Miss Graystone, I know you sometimes feel just like that, for I have seen it in your eyes, and you look just as I have often dreamed my own dear mother did.  And, don’t be angry, but every night, when I say my prayer, I tell Him about you, and pray that you may be taken away from these wicked people, you and little Ruth.  Last night I had a dream.  I thought I stood upon the bank of a broad river, and the water moaned and whispered like human voices, and came up around me, and just as I was beginning to be afraid, a sweet, low voice came to me, borne across the waters, and mingled with their murmur, ‘fear not,’ and then I thought that I knew this was the river of death that you had told me about in the Sabbath School, and I clasped my hands together, and cried out for my dear, dear teacher, and then the water rose about me till, as it reached my lips, I awoke.”

“Poor, little one,” said Clemence, parting the boy’s hair from off his forehead, with a mother touch, and as she gazed down into the innocent eyes, with their far-off, dreamy look, a foreboding of the future came to her, that she put away with a shudder.