Their son was called the pastor of the flock, but he was rather
the porter of the sheepfold than the shepherd of the sheep. He was very
careful that the church should be properly swept and sometimes even
garnished; but about the temple of the Holy Ghost, the hearts of his
sheep, he knew nothing, and cared as little. The gloom of his parents,
their sense of failure and loss, grew and deepened all the dull hot
afternoon, until it seemed almost to pass their endurance. At last,
however, it abated, as does every pain, for life is at its root: thereto
ordained, it slew itself by exhaustion. "But," thought the mother, "there's
Monday coming, and what am I to do then?" With the new day would return
the old trouble, the gnawing, sickening pain that she was childless: her
daughter was gone, and no son was left her! Yet the new day when it came,
brought with it its new possibility of living one day more!
But the minister was far more to be pitied than those whose misery he was.
All night long he slept with a sense of ill-usage sublying his
consciousness, and dominating his dreams; but with the sun came a doubt
whether he had not acted in unseemly fashion, when he turned and left his
father and mother in the churchyard.
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