. After a little, he murmured again:

'I might fool myself with faith again. So it is better not. I would
not be fooled. To believe the false and be happy is the very belly
of misery. To believe the true and be miserable, is to be true--and
miserable. If there is no God, let me know it. I will not be fooled.
I will not believe in a God that does not exist. Better be miserable
because I am, and cannot help it.--O God!'

Yet in his misery, he cried upon God.

These words came upon Robert with such a shock of sympathy, that they
destroyed his consciousness for the moment, and when he thought about
them, he almost doubted if he had heard them. He rose and approached
the bed. Ericson lay with his eyes closed, and his face contorted as by
inward pain. Robert put a spoonful of wine to his lips. He swallowed it,
opened his eyes, gazed at the boy as if he did not know him, closed them
again, and lay still.

Some people take comfort from the true eyes of a dog--and a precious
thing to the loving heart is the love of even a dumb animal. [6] What
comfort then must not such a boy as Robert have been to such a man as
Ericson! Often and often when he was lying asleep as Robert thought,
he was watching the face of his watcher. When the human soul is not yet
able to receive the vision of the God-man, God sometimes--might I not
say always?--reveals himself, or at least gives himself, in some
human being whose face, whose hands are the ministering angels of his
unacknowledged presence, to keep alive the fire of love on the altar
of the heart, until God hath provided the sacrifice--that is, until the
soul is strong enough to draw it from the concealing thicket. Here were
two, each thinking that God had forsaken him, or was not to be found
by him, and each the very love of God, commissioned to tend the other's
heart. In each was he present to the other. The one thought himself the
happiest of mortals in waiting upon his big brother, whose least smile
was joy enough for one day; the other wondered at the unconscious
goodness of the boy, and while he gazed at his ruddy-brown face,
believed in God.

For some time after Ericson was taken ill, he was too depressed and
miserable to ask how he was cared for. But by slow degrees it dawned
upon him that a heart deep and gracious, like that of a woman, watched
over him. True, Robert was uncouth, but his uncouthness was that of a
half-fledged angel. The heart of the man and the heart of the boy w