"At least the generations to come will do you all justice," I said.

"I am not sure of that," he said. "It depends on who writes the history for them. There is one Judgment Seat whose awards it is safe to set before us. Before that we have sought to stand. That sentence is irrevocably fixed. What it is we shall hear hereafter, when the voice of this generation and all the generations will move us no more than the murmur of a troubled sea a great way off, and far below."

Yet he could not touch the food we set before him; and as he sat gazing into the fire, I knew there was one adverse verdict which he knew too well, and which moved his heart all the more that it had not been able to move a hair's breadth his conscience or his purpose.

Many sorrows met in Roger's heart, I knew, that night; the pain of pity repressed driven back on the heart by a stern sense of justice; the pain of being misjudged by some whom we honour; the pain of the resignation of the tenderest love and hope; the pain of giving bitter pain to the heart dearest to him in the world. But one pain, perhaps the worst of all, he and men who, like Cromwell and Colonel Hutchinson, had carried out that day's doom fearlessly before the world because in unshaken conviction of its justice before God, were spared the enervating anguish of perplexity and doubt. And this, perhaps, is the sorest pain of all. 2*

LETTICE'S DIARY.

"The space between is the way thither,' Mr. Drayton said. It may be; it ought to be. But is it? That seems to me precisely the one terrible question which, when we can get cleared, all life becomes clear in the light of the answer, but which it is so exceedingly hard to have cleared.

"The days, as they pass, whether clothed in light and joy, as the old time at home was when I had a home, and a mother, and so many hopes-or in darkness that may be felt, as so many of these later days have been to me, are indeed surely leading us on to old age, to death, to the unseen world, and the judgment. But are they indeed leading us on to new youth, to changeless life, to heaven, and the King's Well done?'

"If I were as sure of the last as of the first, for me and mine, I think (at least there are moments when I think) I would scarcely care whether the days were dark or bright. For life is to be a warfare. All kinds of Christian people agree in that. And having learned what war means, I do not expect it to be easy or pleasant.

"But I am not sure. For myself or for any one. "Roger thinks the execution of the king was a terrible duty. I think it was almost an inexpiable crime.

"Olive, I know, thinks I am breaking plighted faith, and betraying the most faithful affection in the world in parting from Roger. Mistress Dorothy thinks I am fulfilling a sacred duty, doing what was

meant when we were commanded to pluck out the right eye. As to the pain, I am sure she is right. If I could only be as sure as to the duty! For if it is right, it must be good, really, in the end for him as well as for me. How, I cannot imagine. For it seems bad as well as bitter for me. And Olive says it will be bad and embittering for him.

"Happy, happy people, who lived in the old days of dreams, and visions, and heavenly voices, saying, "This is the way; walk in it;' when God's will became manifest in pillars of fire and cloud, in discriminating dews and fires of sacrifice, and such simple outward signs as poor perplexed hearts like mine can understand.

"Holy people say these days of ours are in advance of those, that the light has increased since then. I suppose it has, for holy people, who have grown up to it, and have eyes to see those inward leadings, and ears to hear those inward voices, which to me are so dim. But I feel as if I were still a child, and would fain have lived in that simple childhood of the world, when God spoke to men in plain ways as to children.

"Since I came here, I saw at the door of one of the churches a very awful piece of sculpture of the souls in purgatory, all aglow with the fires in which they were burning, stretching out piteous hands through iron bars for help and prayers from those still living on the earth.

"Mistress Dorothy was with me, and she clasped her hands over her eyes in horror, as she turned away.

"But to me it did not seem so horrible. At least not for the souls in purgatory. If there were a purgatory. Because the thought of its being pur gatory, must take away all that is unendurable out of the anguish of the flames. There are hearts on carth tormented in fires as real. But the sting of their anguish is, they cannot be sure they are purgatorial fires. The anguish is clear enough. If we could only be as sure as to the purification. That the pain is from the remedy, not from the disease; that the flames are on the way to heaven, not mercifully confronting us on the other way to turn us back.

"It always seemed as if, by Roger's side, I should have grown good like him. How am I to grow good without him, severing myself from him? Oh, mother, mother! why must you leave me just now, when no one else in the world could have told me what to do. Because, while loving me more than yourself, you loved God's will far more than my pleasure.

"But Mistress Dorothy says, when I am tempted with 'vain reasonings' and 'debatings of the flesh,' I must go back to the first sacred impulse, when, by my mother's death-bed, I felt the death of the king for whom she would have died must place an impassable barrier between me and those who slew him, or consented to his death.

And

"First thoughts, says she, are often from above; second thoughts from within or from below. if we endure to the end, third thoughts will come crowning the divine impulse of the first with a calm divine assurance.

"I will try to endure to the end. At least I will wait.

"To strengthen my resolve, let me go back to that sacred impulse, and through all it led to, up to this day.

"It was during those terrible days of early January, when hope and fear had passed, with uncertainty; and I sat by my mother's bedside, all my heart and soul absorbed in watching her depart, and in relieving any suffering or supplying any want for her so fast passing away from all suffering and from all our service.

"The east winds were careering across the Fens, and broke fiercely against the old house, and one night there was a crash of the great scarred elm-tree falling close outside the windows. But she heeded it not; and I remember feeling a strange kind of despairing triumph over all the violence of the elements. They might rage as at the Deluge; but they could neither hinder nor hasten the slow, silent progress of the awful power which was silently removing her from us.

"Before, in days of doubt and hope, I had been wont to watch the winds with a kind of superstitious solicitude, as if there were some mysterious sympathy between nature and men, and the ravings of her storms had been ominous of evil to us. But now that spell seemed broken. The sympathy between us and nature ceased with death. To her it was natural, a link in her endless chain of ever-recurring changes. To her, life and death were but as day and night, bright or dark phases of her ceaseless