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Hilbrook came to church as before, and blinked at him through the two sermons which Ewbert preached on significant texts, and the minister hoped he was listening with a sense of personal appeal in them.

"I see what you mean," said Ewbert, "and I allow that there is no real analogy between our life and that of the grass and bushes; yet somehow I feel strengthened in my belief in the hereafter by each renewal of the earth's life. It isn't a proof, it isn't a promise; but it's a suggestion, an intimation."

The day following the last of his sermons, Ewbert had to officiate at the funeral of a little child whose mother had been stricken to the earth by her bereavement.

"Well," said Ewbert, meeting him fully in his humility, "let us try to make it out together. Let us try to think. Apparently, our way has brought us to a dead wall; but I believe there's light beyond it, if we can only break through. Is it really necessary that we should discover some new principle? Do we know all that love can do from our experience of it here?"

"It's just like your thinking you hadn't taken cold, the other day when you were caught in the rain; and the next morning you got up with a sore throat, and it was Sunday morning, too." Ewbert could not deny this, and he had no great wish to see Hilbrook soon again.

His wife did not give Hilbrook time to get away, if he had wished, without seeing her; she rose at once and went out to him. Ewbert heard her asking him into the library, and then he heard them in parley there; and presently they came out into the hall again, and went to the front door together.

He generally sold his grass standing, and his apples on the trees; and he had no animals about the place except his chickens, they took care of themselves. Ewbert urged, for the sake of conversation, even of a disputative character, that poultry were liable to disease, if they were not looked after; but Hilbrook said, Not if there were not too many of them, and so made an end of that subject.

Ewbert passed the point, and asked, "What did you talk about when you got started?" "I found he was a reader, or had been. There was a case of good books in the parlor, and I began by talking with him about them." "Well, what did he say about them?" "That he wasn't interested in them. He had been once, but he was not now." "I can understand that," said Mrs. Ewbert philosophically. "Yes."

Ewbert had learned not to inquire too critically for a logical process in his wife's changes of attitude toward any fact. In her present mood he recognized an effect of the exuberant good-will awakened by the handsome behavior of the university people, and he agreed with her that he must go to see old Hilbrook at once.

Ewbert stirring about in the rooms beyond with an activity in which he divined a menacing impatience; and he would have been glad to get rid of old Hilbrook before her impatience burst in an irruption upon them.