The girl shook her head. “There’s no next time,” she said; “once you’re put down as one of the stand-offs. Plenty of others to take your place.” “Man has more interests,” Joan argued, “a thousand other allurements to distract him; we must cultivate his finer instincts.”!

And yet was it altogether a dead truth: this passionate belief in a personal God who had ordered all things for the best: who could be appealed to for comfort, for help? Might it not be as good an explanation as any other of the mystery surrounding us? It had been so universal. She was not sure where, but somewhere she had come across an analogy that had strongly impressed her. “The fact that a man feels thirsty—though at the time he may be wandering through the Desert of Sahara—proves that somewhere in the world there is water.” Might not the success of Christianity in responding to human needs be evidence in its favour? The Love of God, the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, the Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Were not all human needs provided for in that one comprehensive promise: the desperate need of man to be convinced that behind all the seeming muddle was a loving hand guiding towards good; the need of the soul in its loneliness for fellowship, for strengthening; the need of man in his weakness for the kindly grace of human sympathy, of human example. “Oh, I don’t blame them,” she added. “It isn’t a thing to be dismissed with a toss of your head. I thought it all out. Don’t know now what decided me. Something inside me, I suppose.”

Madge still held to her hope. God would make a wind of reason to pass over the earth. He would not smite again his people. “Hulloa. You’ve got ’em on,” she said. The woman made no attempt to deny. Something told her that Joan had learned her secret. She glanced towards the door. Joan had closed it.