no more than a hint of the
brogue:

"Now there's what we were talking of the last time I was here: 'Let not
your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Ye believe in God;
believe also in me.' There's the two great plagues of human
existence--fear and trouble--staggered for you at a blow. And you do
believe in God, now, don't you?"

Thor had turned to tiptoe down again when he heard the words, spoken in
the rebellious tones with which he was familiar, modulated now to an odd
submissiveness: "I don't know whether I do or not. Isn't there something
in the Bible about, 'Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief'?"

"There is, and it's a good way to begin."

Thor was out in the yard before he could hear more. Standing for a
minute in the windy sunshine, he wondered at the curious phenomenon
presented by men in evident possession of their faculties who relied for
the dispersion of human care on means invisible and mystic. The fact
that in this case he himself had appealed to the illusion rendered the
working of it none the less astonishing. His own method for the
dispersion of human care--and the project was dear to him--was by
dollars and cents. It was, moreover, a method as to which there was no
trouble in proving the efficiency.

He took up the subject of her mother with Rosie, who, with the help of
Antonio, was rearranging the masses of azaleas, carnations, and
poinsettias after the depletion of the Christmas sales. "She's really
better, isn't she?"

Rosie pushed a white azalea to the place on the stand that would best
display its domelike regularity. "She seems to be."

"What do you think has helped her?"

She gave him a queer little sidelong smile. "You're the doctor. I should
think you'd know."

He adored those smiles--constrained, unwilling, distrustful smiles that
varied the occasional earnest looks that he got from her green eyes.
"But I don't know. It isn't anything I do for her."

She banked two or three azaleas together, so that their shades of pink
and pomegranate-red might blend. "I suppose it's Dr. Hilary."

"I know it's Dr. Hilary. But he isn't working by magic. If she's getting
back her nerve it isn't because he wishes it on her, as the boys say."

Suspecting all his approaches, she confined herself to saying, "I'm sure
I don't know," speaking like a guilty witness under cross-examination.
The assiduity of his visits, the persistency with which he tried to make
her talk, kept her the more