ou used to laugh at my belief in Providence."

"Is that how you want me to help?"

"If you will."

Perigal's face fell.

"Fire away," he said, as he lit a cigarette.

Mavis told him something of her perplexities.

"I want to see things clearly. I want to find out exactly where I am.
Everything's so confusing and contradictory. I shan't be really happy
till I know what I really and truly believe."

"How can I help you? You have to believe what you do believe."

"But why do I believe what I do believe?"

"Because you can't help yourself. Your present condition of mind is the
result of all you have experienced in your existence acting upon the
peculiar kind of intelligence with which your parents started you in
life. Take my advice, don't worry about these things. If you look them
squarely in the face, you only come to brutal conclusions. Life's a
beastly struggle to live, and then, when subsistence is secured, to be
happy. It's nature's doing; it sees to it that we're always sharpening
our weapons."

Mavis did not speak for a few moments; when she did, it was to say:

"I can't understand how I escaped."

"From utter disaster?" he asked.

"Scarcely that."

"I hope not, indeed. But you were a fool not to write to me and let me
have it for my selfishness. But I take it that at the worst you'd have
written, when, of course, I should have done all I could."

"All?"

"Well--all I reasonably could."

"I wasn't thinking so much of that," said Mavis. "What I can't
understand is why I've dropped into all this good fortune, even if it's
at your expense."

"You owe it to the fact of your being your father's daughter and that
he was friendly with the pater. Next, you must thank your personality;
but the chief thing was that you are your father's daughter."

"And I often and often wished I'd been born a London shop-girl, so that
I should never long for things that were then out of my reach. So there
was really something in my birth after all."

"I should jolly well think there was. It's no end of an asset. But to
go back to what we were talking about."

"About nature's designs to make us all fight for our own?"

"Yes. Look at yourself. You're now ever so much harder than you were."

"Are you surprised?" she asked vehemently, as she all but betrayed her
hatred.

"It's really a good thing from your point of view. It's made you more
fitted to take your own part in the struggle."

"Then, those who injured m