worried, but she knew Connie would do as she said. So she
got up nervously and went with her. She would have to see it through
now, of course. Connie walked silently up the stairs, with Carol
following meekly behind, and rapped at her father's door. Then she
entered, and Carol, in a hushed sort of way, closed the door behind
them.

"I'm reading this, father. Any objections?" Connie faced him calmly, and
handed him the little book.

He examined it gravely, his brows contracting, a sudden wrinkling at the
corners of his lips that might have meant laughter, or disapproval, or
anything.

"I thought a parsonage girl should not read it," Carol said bravely.
"I've never read it myself, but I've heard about it, and parsonage girls
ought to read parsonage things. Prudence says so. But--"

"But I want to know what other folks think about what I believe," said
Connie. "So I'm reading it."

"What do you think of, it?" he asked quietly, and he looked very
strangely at his baby daughter. It was suddenly borne in on him that
this was one crisis in her growth to womanhood, and he felt a great
yearning tenderness for her, in her innocence, in her dauntless courage,
in her reaching ahead, always ahead! It was a crisis, and he must be
very careful.

"I think it is beautiful," Connie said softly, and her lips drooped a
little, and a wistful pathos crept into her voice. "It seems so sad. I
keep wishing I could cry about it. There's nothing really sad in it, I
think it is supposed to be rather jovial, but--it seems terrible to me,
even when it is the most beautiful. Part of it I don't understand very
well."

He held out a hand to Connie, and she put her own in it confidently.
Carol, too, came and stood close beside him.

"Yes," he said, "it is beautiful, Connie, and it is very terrible. We
can't understand it fully because we can't feel what he felt. It is a
groping poem, a struggling for light when one is stumbling in darkness."
He looked thoughtfully at the girls. "He was a marvelous man, that
Khayyam,--years ahead of his people, and his time. He was big enough to
see the idiocy of the heathen ideas of God, he was beyond them, he
spurned them. But he was not quite big enough to reach out, alone, and
get hold of our kind of a God. He was reaching out, he was struggling,
but he couldn't quite catch hold. It is a wonderful poem. It shows the
weakness, the helplessness of a gifted man who has nothing to cling to.
I think it will do