When her uncle left her, she sat motionless a long time, thinking much but hoping little. The darkness gathered deeper and deeper around her. Some sorrows seem beyond the reach of consolation, in as much as their causes seem beyond setting right. They can at best, as it seems, only be covered over. Forgetfulness alone seems capable of removing their sting, and from that cure every noble mind turns away as unworthy both of itself, and of its Father in heaven. But the human heart has to go through much before it is able to house even a suspicion of the superabounding riches of the creating and saving God. The foolish child thinks there can be nothing where he sees nothing. The human heart feels as if where it cannot devise help, there is none possible to God, as if God, like the heart, must be content to botch the thing up, and make, as we say, the best of it.

But as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his ways higher than our ways, and his thoughts than our thoughts.

It was a sore and dreary time for Hester, alone in the room where she had spent so many happy hours. She sat in a window seat, looking out upon the leafless trees and the cold, gloomy old statue in the midst of them. Frost was upon every twig. A thin, sad fog filled the comfortless air. There might be warm, happy homes somewhere, but they no longer belonged to her world. The fire was burning cheerfully behind her, but her eyes were fixed on the dreary square. She was hardly thinking—only letting thoughts and feelings come and go. What a thing is life and being, when a soul has become but the room in which ghosts hold their revel, when the man or woman is no longer master of himself, and can no more say to this or that thought, you shall come, and you shall go. That person is a slave to his own existence—he can neither cease to be, nor order his being. He is able only to entangle himself even more in the net he has knotted around him! Such is every soul who is parted from the essential life, who is not one with the Power by which he lives. God is all in all, and he made us out of himself. He who is parted from God is a live discord, an antitruth.

Not such was Hester, and although her thoughts now came and went without her, they did not come and go without God, and a truth from the depths of her own true being was on its way to console her.

How would her fiancé receive the news? That was the agitating question. What would he do?