orse; and making little slight remarks, in a
manner so gentle and quiet as to be very reassuring. But if that was
what Diana wanted, she wanted a great deal of it; for she sat looking
straight between the edges of her sun-bonnet, absolutely silent, hardly
even making the replies her companion's words called for. At last he
was silent too. The good grey horse went very soberly on, not urged at
all; but yet even a slow rate of motion will take you to the end of
anything, given the time; and every minute saw the rods of Diana's road
getting behind her. I suppose she felt that, and spoke at last in the
desperate sense of it. When a person is under that urgency, he does not
always choose his words.

"Mr. Masters, is there any way of making life anything but a miserable
failure?"

The lowered cadences of Diana's voice, a thread of bitterness in her
utterance, quite turned the minister's thought from anything like a
light or a gay answer. He said very gravely,

"Nobody's life need be that."

"How are you to get rid of it?"

"Of that result, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Will you state the difficulty, as it appears to you?"

"Why, look at it," said Diana, more hesitatingly; "what do most
people's lives amount to?--what does mine? To dress oneself, and eat
and drink, and go through a round of things, which only mean that you
will dress yourself and eat and drink again and do the same things
to-morrow, and the next day;--what does it all amount to in the end?"

"Is life no more than that to you?"

Diana hesitated, but then, with a tone still lowered, said, "No."

The minister was silent now, and presently Diana went on again.

"The whole world seems to me just so. People live, and die; and they
might just as well not have lived, for all that their being in the
world has done. And yet they have lived--and suffered."

More than she knew was told in the utterance of that last word. The
minister was still not in a hurry to speak. When he did, his question
came as a surprise.

"You believe the first chapter of Genesis, Miss Diana?"

"Certainly," she said, feeling with downcast heart, "O, now a sermon!"

"You believe that God made the earth, and made man to occupy it?"

"Yes--certainly."

"What do you think he made him for?"

"I know what the catechism says," Diana began slowly.

"No, no; my question has nothing to do with the catechism. Do you
believe that the Creator's intention was that men should live
purposeless l