ing more. Now, what does it all mean?"

Olive perceived by these words, that the child was playing upon her
mother's grave. Only it seemed strange that she should have been left
so entirely ignorant with regard to the great mysteries of death and
immortality. Miss Rothesay was puzzled what to answer.

"My child, if your mamma be here, it is her body only." And Olive
paused, startled at the difficulty she found in explaining in the
simplest terms the doctrine of the soul's immortality. At last she
continued, "When you go to sleep do you not often dream of walking in
beautiful places and seeing beautiful things, and the dreams are so
happy that you would not mind whether you slept on your soft bed or on
the hard ground? Well, so it is with your mamma; her body has been laid
down to sleep, but her mind--her spirit, is flying far away in beautiful
dreams. She never feels at all that she is lying in her grave under the
ground."

"But how long will her body lie there? and will it ever wake?"

"Yes, it will surely wake, though how soon we know not, and be taken up
to heaven and to God."

The child looked earnestly in Olive's face. "What is heaven, and what is
God?"

Miss Rothesay's amazement was not unmingled with horror. Her own
religious faith had dawned so imperceptibly--at once an instinct and a
lesson--that there seemed something awful in this question of an utterly
untaught mind.

"My poor child," she said, "do you not know who is God?--has no one told
you?"

"No one."

"Then I will."

"Pardon me, madam," said a man's voice behind, calm, cold, but not
unmusical; "but it seems to me that a father is the best teacher of his
child's faith."

"Papa--it is papa." With a look of shyness almost amounting to fear, the
child slid from the tombstone and ran away.

Olive stood face to face with the father.

He was a gentleman--a true _gentleman_; at the first glance any one
would have given him that honourable and rarely-earned name. His age
might be about thirty-five, but his face was cast in the firm rigid
mould over which years pass and leave no trace. He might have looked
as old as now at twenty; at fifty he would probably look little older.
Handsome he was, as Olive discerned at a glance, but there was something
in him that controlled her much more than mere beauty would have done.
It was a grave dignity of presence, which indicated that mental sway
which some men are born to hold, first over themselves, and