The gates ajar. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

226 The Gates Ajar.
with my dear Lord to see and speak with
every day- would be' Heaven our Home."'
"There will be no days, then?"
"There will be succession of time. There
may not be alternations of twenty-four hours
dark or light, but' I use with thee an earthly
language,' as the wife said in that beautiful
little'Awakening,' of Therrmin's. Do you
remember it? Do read it over, if you have n't
read it lately.
"As to our coming back here, there is an
echo to Peter's assertion, in the idea of a world
under a curse, destroyed and regenerated, - the
atonement of Christ reaching, with something
more than poetic force, the very sands of the
earth which he trod with bleeding feet to make
himself its Saviour. That makes me feel —
don't you see? -what a taint there is in sin.
If dumb dust is to have such awful cleansing,
what must be needed for you and me?
" How many pleasant talks we have had
about these things, Mary! Well, it cannot
be long, at the longest, before we know, even
as we are known."
I looked at her smiling white face, - it is
always very white now, — and something
struck slowly through me, like a chill