ne was a woman who clung to no special religion, but she had
always, all her life, had a very strong personal consciousness of a
directing Power in the world, had always had an innate conviction that
this directing Power followed with deep interest the life of each
individual in the scheme of His creation. She had always felt, she felt
now, that God knew everything about her and her life, was aware of all
her feelings, was constantly intent upon her.

He was intent. But was He kindly or was He cruelly intent?

Surely He had been dreadfully cruel to her!

Only yesterday she had been wondering what bereaved women felt about God.
Now she was one of these women.

"Was Maurice dead?" she thought--"was he already dead when I was praying
before the shrine of the Madonna della Rocca?"

She longed to know. Yet she scarcely knew why she longed. It was like a
strange, almost unnatural curiosity which she could not at first explain
to herself. But presently her mind grew clearer and she connected this
question with that other question--of God and what He really was, what He
really felt towards His creatures, towards her.

Had God allowed her to pray like that, with all her heart and soul, and
then immediately afterwards deliberately delivered her over to the fate
of desolate women, or had Maurice been already dead? If that were so, and
it must surely have been so, for when she prayed it was already night,
she had been led to pray for herself ignorantly, and God had taken away
her joy before He had heard her prayer. If He had heard it first He
surely could not have dealt so cruelly with her--so cruelly! No human
being could have, she thought, even the most hard-hearted.

But perhaps God was not all-powerful.

She remembered that once in London she had asked a clever and good
clergyman if, looking around upon the state of things in the world, he
was able to believe without difficulty that the world was governed by an
all-wise, all-powerful, and all-merciful God. And his reply to her had
been, "I sometimes wonder whether God is all-powerful--yet." She had not
pursued the subject, but she had not forgotten this answer; and she
thought of it now.

Was there a conflict in the regions beyond the world which was the only
one she knew? Had an enemy done this thing, an enemy not only of hers,
but of God's, an enemy who had power over God?

That thought was almost more terrible than the thought that God had been
cruel to her.

Sh