and her annoyance.

"No; was it a good story or a bad one which you were reading?"

"It was both."

"Well--it is no matter, those accidental marks can have no
significance."

"Do you think so?"

"I am sure."

"You do not believe in any signs?"

"None."

"You know that the traveler on the desert told the Bedouin that he did
not, and yet from the foot prints of the camels the Bedouin deciphered
the whole history of a caravan."

Astonished at her reply, David did not answer.

"And then, you know," she continued, "there are the weather signs."

"Yes--that is so."

"And what are the letters of a book but signs?"

"You are right again."

"And is not hardness a sign of something in a stone, and heat of
something in fire? And are not deeds the sign of some quality in a man's
soul, and the expressions of his face signs of emotions of his heart?"

"They are."

"So that by his gait and gestures each man says: 'I am a farmer--a
quack--a Quaker--a soldier--a priest'?"

"This, too, is true."

"Why, then, should not the character and destiny of the man disclose
itself in signs and marks upon his hands?"

David was too much astonished by these words to answer. They revealed a
mental power which he had not even suspected her of possessing. He
discovered that while she was as ignorant as a child in the realms of
thought to which she had been unaccustomed, in her sphere of experience
and reflection she was both shrewd and deep.

"You have thought much about this matter," he said.

"Too much, perhaps."

"It is deeper than I knew."

"And so is everything deeper than we know. Tell me, if you can, why it
is that having met you I have lost faith in my art, and having met me
you have lost faith in your religion."

"It is strange."

"Something must be true. Do you not think so?"

"I have begun to doubt it."

"I believe that what _you_ said is true."

As they stood thus confronting each other, they would have presented a
study of equal interest to the artist or to the philosopher. There was
both a poem and a picture in their attitude. Grace and beauty revealed
themselves on every feature and in every movement. They had arrived at
one of those dramatic points in their life-journey, where all the tragic
elements of existence seem to converge. Agitated by incomprehensible and
delicious emotions, confronting insoluble problems, longing, hoping,
fearing, they hovered over the ocean of life like two tiny sparrow