How Robert knew them to be
pearls he could not tell, for he did not know that he had ever seen
any pearls before, but he knew they were pearls, and that pearls had
something to do with the New Jerusalem. But the sadness of it all
at length overpowered him, and he burst out crying. For it was
awfully sad that his mother's portrait should be in his own mother's
box.
He took a bit of red tape off a bundle of the papers, put it through
the eye of the setting, and hung the picture round his neck, inside
his clothes, for grannie must not see it. She would take that away
as she had taken his fiddle. He had a nameless something now for
which he had been longing for years.
Looking again in the box, he found a little bit of paper,
discoloured with antiquity, as it seemed to him, though it was not
so old as himself. Unfolding it he found written upon it a
well-known hymn, and at the bottom of the hymn, the words: 'O Lord!
my heart is very sore.'--The treasure upon Robert's bosom was no
longer the symbol of a mother's love, but of a woman's sadness,
which he could not reach to comfort. In that hour, the boy made a
great stride towards manhood. Doubtless his mother's grief had been
the same as grannie's--the fear that she would lose her husband for
ever. The hourly fresh griefs from neglect and wrong did not occur
to him; only the never never more. He looked no farther, took the
portrait from his neck and replaced it with the paper, put the box
back, and walled it up in solitude once more with the dusty bundles.
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