Joan.
"Perhaps He, too, is sorry for them."

"It comes to the same thing, doesn't it, dear?" she answered. "They are
there, anyhow. And that is how He knows those who are willing to serve
Him: by their being pitiful."

They fell into a silence. Joan found herself dreaming.

Yes, it was true. It must have been the beginning of all things. Man,
pitiless, deaf, blind, groping in the darkness, knowing not even himself.
And to her vision, far off, out of the mist, he shaped himself before
her: that dim, first standard-bearer of the Lord, the man who first felt
pity. Savage, brutish, dumb--lonely there amid the desolation, staring
down at some hurt creature, man or beast it mattered not, his dull eyes
troubled with a strange new pain he understood not.

And suddenly, as he stooped, there must have come a great light into his
eyes.

Man had heard God's voice across the deep, and had made answer.

CHAPTER XV

The years that followed--till, like some shipwrecked swimmer to whom
returning light reveals the land, she felt new life and hopes come back
to her--always remained in her memory vague, confused; a jumble of
events, thoughts, feelings, without sequence or connection.

She had gone down to Liverpool, intending to persuade her father to leave
the control of the works to Arthur, and to come and live with her in
London; but had left without broaching the subject. There were nights
when she would trapse the streets till she would almost fall exhausted,
rather than face the solitude awaiting her in her own rooms. But so also
there were moods when, like some stricken animal, her instinct was to
shun all living things. At such times his presence, for all his loving
patience, would have been as a knife in her wound. Besides, he would
always be there, when escape from herself for a while became an absolute
necessity. More and more she had come to regard him as her comforter.
Not from anything he ever said or did. Rather, it seemed to her, because
that with him she felt no need of words.

The works, since Arthur had shared the management, had gradually been
regaining their position; and he had urged her to let him increase her
allowance.

"It will give you greater freedom," he had suggested with fine assumption
of propounding a mere business proposition; "enabling you to choose your
work entirely for its own sake. I have always wanted to take a hand in
helping things on. It will come to just the same