Stanton was silent, and both ministers seemed to be going over the great events through which they had passed. Then Stanton said gently, “Mr. Maxwell, I have a statement which I wish to make to you. Not a confession exactly, and yet it is in one way, but the fact is, I am planning to get married, to have that home you said a few days ago I ought to have.”

Maxwell looked at his assistant keenly. “You’re going to leave us? I don’t know how I can spare you.”

“I’m not planning to go yet, Mr. Maxwell. But I am planning to take from you one of your best—the best, I think—of your parishioners. All I can say is I can’t help myself and, to tell the truth, don’t want to.”

Mr. Maxwell’s face suddenly brightened. He took a step nearer his assistant and put a hand on his shoulder. “Richard,” he said in the affectionate manner that had knit him so closely to his own young people all the years, “I congratulate Miss Page and you. I don’t know which one needs the other most. Let me call Mrs. Maxwell. She will be delighted. In fact, we have once or twice actually wished this might happen.”

He called to Mrs. Maxwell, and when she entered the study he was about to break the news to her, but she smilingly anticipated her husband. “Oh, I know all about it, Mr. Stanton! I couldn’t be more delighted if Virginia were my own daughter. You have our heartiest blessing.”

Stanton’s eyes glowed as he took Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell’s hands. “I shall prize your friendship for her sake and my own.” And then he added, as Virginia had, “It was an unspeakable joy to have Jesus speak to us as he did before he went away. That will follow us all our lives.”

And then that silence fell between them, the silence that the world was to know more and more after its centuries of bustle and hurry and din, the silence that Jesus always brings—the peace that passes understanding and is the source of more permanent power for righteousness than all noisy meetings and fussy “plans” for helping God do his work among his creatures.

Stanton at last rose to go, but Maxwell asked him to wait a moment. “I want you to see something Martha has. Wait a moment.”

He went out of the study and soon returned with Martha. Mrs. Maxwell had told him something of the girl’s history, and Stanton was deeply interested in it. Besides, had not Martha been the first person to announce to them the advent of Jesus into Raymond and tell the story of his appearance at her church meeting?