Happy he if then at
last he begin to turn from the evil itself, so repenting! This Cornelius
had not begun to do yet, but his illness, while perhaps it delayed the
time when the thought of turning should present itself, made it more
likely the thought would be entertained when it did present itself.
The father came back from his lonely walk, in which his communion with
nature had been of the smallest, as determined as before that his son,
having unsonned himself, should no more be treated as a son. He could
not refuse him shelter in his house for a time, but he should be in it
on sufferance--in no right of sonship, and should be made to understand
it was so!
But the heart of the mother was longing after her boy, like a human hen
whose chicken had run from under her wing and come to grief. He had
sinned, he had suffered, and was in disgrace--good reasons why the
mother's heart should cling to the youth, why her arms should long to
fold him to her bosom! The things which made his father feel he could
not speak to him again, worked in the deeper nature of the mother in
opposite fashion. In her they reached a stratum of the Divine.
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