n Nature--and probably we are, being the
apparent result of the whole--whence, naturally, having risen, we seek
to rise, we feel after something we fancy higher. For as to the system
in which we live, we are so ignorant that we can but blunderingly feel
our way in it; and if we knew all its laws, we could neither order nor
control, save by a poor subservience. We are the slaves of our
circumstance, therefore betake ourselves to dreams of what _ought to
be_."

Miss Meredith was silent for a time.

"I can not see how to answer you," she said at length. "But you do not
disturb my hope of seeing my father again. We have a sure word of
prophecy."

Faber suppressed the smile of courteous contempt that was ready to break
forth, and she went on:

"It would ill become me to doubt to-day, as you will grant when I tell
you a wonderful fact. This morning I had not money enough to buy myself
the pair of strong shoes you told me I must wear. I had nothing left but
a few trinkets of my mother's--one of them a ring I thought worth about
ten pounds. I gave it to my landlady to sell for me, hoping she would
get five for it. She brought me fifty, and I am rich!"

Her last words trembled with triumph. He had himself been building her
up in her foolish faith! But he took consolation in thinking how easily
with a word he could any moment destroy that buttress of her phantom
house. It was he, the unbeliever, and no God in or out of her Bible,
that had helped her! It did not occur to him that she might after all
see in him only a reed blown of a divine wind.

"I am glad to hear of your good fortune," he answered. "I can not say I
see how it bears on the argument. You had in your possession more than
you knew."

"Does the length of its roots alter the kind of the plant?" she asked.
"Do we not know in all nature and history that God likes to see things
grow? That must be the best way. It may be the only right way. If that
ring was given to my mother against the time when the last child of her
race should find herself otherwise helpless, would the fact that the
provision was made so early turn the result into a mere chance meeting
of necessity and subsidy? Am I bound to call every good thing I receive
a chance, except an angel come down visibly out of the blue sky and give
it to me? That would be to believe in a God who could not work His will
by His own laws. Here I am, free and hopeful--all I needed. Every thing
was dark and troubled y