e same soil, and are, I
sometimes think, different manifestations of the same thing. Do you know
it is ridiculous to hear you talk of having lost your faith, because I
don't believe it. At the worst it has gone to sleep, and will wake
up again one day. Possibly you may not accept some particular form of
faith, but I tell you frankly that to reject all religion simply because
you cannot understand it, is nothing but a form of atrocious spiritual
vanity. Your mind is too big for you, Miss Granger: it has run away
with you, but you know it is tied by a string--it cannot go far. And now
perhaps you will be angry again."

"No, indeed, why should I be angry? I daresay that you are quite right,
and I only hope that I may be able to believe again. I will tell you how
I lost belief. I had a little brother whom I loved more than anything
else in the world, indeed after my mother died he was the only thing I
really had to love, for I think that my father cares more for Elizabeth
than he does for me, she is so much the better at business matters, and
Elizabeth and I never quite got on. I daresay that the fault is mine,
but the fact remains--we are sisters but we are not intimate. Well, my
brother fell ill of a fever, and for a long time he lay between life and
death, and I prayed for him as I never prayed for anybody or anything
before--yes, I prayed that I might die instead of him. Then he passed
through the crisis and got better, and I thanked God, thinking that my
prayers had been answered; oh, how happy I was for those ten days! And
then this happened:--My brother got a chill, a relapse followed, and in
three days he was dead. The last words that he spoke to me were, 'Oh,
don't let me die, Bee!'--he used to call me Bee--'Please don't let me
die, dear Bee!' But he died, died in my arms, and when it was over I
rose from his side feeling as though my heart was dead also. I prayed
no more after that. It seemed to me as though my prayers had been mocked
at, as though he had been given back to me for a little while in order
that the blow might be more crushing when it fell."

"Don't you think that you were a little foolish in taking such a view?"
said Geoffrey. "Have you not been amused, sometimes, to read about the
early Christians?--how the lead would not boil the martyr, or the lion
would not eat him, or the rain from a blue sky put out the fire, and how
the pagan king at once was converted and accepted a great many
difficult doc