"But would you have had him
live through this? Live, with the whole world out of his grasp, again?
Live, with all his plans wrecked and broken? Live on in this new time,
where he could have comprehended nothing? Live on, in misery and rage
and impotence?
"Your father was an old man, Catherine. You know as well as I
do--better, perhaps--the whole trend of his life's thought and ambition.
Even if he'd lived, he couldn't have changed, now, at his age. It would
have been an utter impossibility. Why say more?"
Catherine made no reply; but in her very attitude of trust and
confidence, Gabriel knew he read the comfort he had given her.
Silence, a while. At last she spoke.
"Visions!" she whispered. "Wonderful visions of the glad, new time! How
do you see them, Gabriel?"
"How do I see them?" His face seemed to glow with inspiration under the
shining light in the far heavens. "I see them as the realization of a
time, now really close at hand, when this old world of ours shall be, as
it never yet has been, in truth civilized, emancipated, free.
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