“I’m glad you didn’t do it,” said Joan: “that you put up a fight for all women.” Suddenly she heard a light step in the passage, and the room door opened. A girl entered. She was wearing a large black hat and a black boa round her neck. Between them her face shone unnaturally white. She carried a small cloth bag. She started, on seeing Joan, and seemed about to retreat.!

She had been busy at her machine when Joan had entered; and a pile of delicate white work lay folded on a chair beside her. “No,” answered Joan. “But my mother was. Are you?”

“No,” he answered. “We used to write to one another until she gave it up. She had got into the habit of looking upon me as a harmless sort of thing to confide in and ask advice of—which she never took.” “And God has been good to us, also,” he explained. Beauty. That was the key to the riddle. All Nature: its golden sunsets and its silvery dawns; the glory of piled-up clouds, the mystery of moonlit glades; its rivers winding through the meadows; the calling of its restless seas; the tender witchery of Spring; the blazonry of autumn woods; its purple moors and the wonder of its silent mountains; its cobwebs glittering with a thousand jewels; the pageantry of starry nights. Form, colour, music! The feathered choristers of bush and brake raising their matin and their evensong, the whispering of the leaves, the singing of the waters, the voices of the winds. Beauty and grace in every living thing, but man. The leaping of the hares, the grouping of cattle, the flight of swallows, the dainty loveliness of insects’ wings, the glossy skin of horses rising and falling to the play of mighty muscles. Was it not seeking to make plain to us that God’s language was beauty. Man must learn beauty that he may understand God.