reparation? What will you do?" persisted the
Frenchman.

"What _can_ I do?" replied Sommers. "Have you not just shown me that I
am utterly helpless? In such a case there is only one course left--
namely, to go to Him who can succour the helpless. I will ask counsel
of God. The pride you have referred to I admit, though it is by no
means confined to my own countrymen! Too long have I given way to it,
and acted independently of my Maker. Perhaps God sent me here to
convince me of my sin and helplessness."

"There is no God. I do not believe in a God," said Laronde calmly.

"Why not?" asked Sommers, in surprise.

"Because," replied Laronde bitterly, "if there was a God He could not
stand by and see me suffering such prolonged and awful misery."

"If, instead of misery, you had been placed during the last twelve years
in supreme felicity, would you have believed in a God?" asked Sommers.

Laronde was silent. He saw that the reason which he had given for
disbelief was untenable, and he was too straightforward to quibble about
it.

"I don't know," he said at last angrily. "No doubt there are hundreds
of men in happy and favourable circumstances who say, as I do, that they
don't believe in a God. I don't know. All I do know is that I am
supremely miserable!"

"Now you are reasonable," returned the merchant, "for you talk of what
you do know, and you admit that in regard to God you `don't know,' but
you began by stating that `there is no God.' Ah, my friend, I
sympathise with you in your terrible sorrow, even as you have
sympathised with me in mine, but don't let us give way to despair and
cast the only Refuge that remains to us behind our backs. I will not
ask you to join me in praying to One, in whom you say you do not
believe, but I will pray _for_ you."

Hugh Sommers got upon his knees and then and there--in the dark and dank
prison-house--prayed most earnestly for guidance and spiritual light in
the name of Jesus. At first the Frenchman listened with what we may
style kindly contempt, and then with surprise, for the Englishman drew
to the conclusion of his very brief prayer without any mention of his
own name. Just at the close, however, Sommers said, "O God! show to my
friend here that he is wrong, and that Thou art Love."

It was with eager and trembling heart next day that Hugh Sommers
watched, during the noontide meal, for the coming of his mysterious
black friend, and it was with no less an