een dispelled by her
laughter, gathered again.

"Separate the character of the man from his occupation," she cried.
"Grant that he is what we would all like in a friend. Separate him, too,
from any idea that I would marry him, for I was not thinking of such a
thing. Is there not enough left to distress me? Do you think I underrate
the evil of the occupation, even though I believe it has not tainted
him? Having owned him as a friend, isn't it difficult to know what
degree of friendship I can continue to own for him?"

"My dear, I think you hardly realise how unwise it is to think of
friendship between yourself and any such man; recognition of worth there
may be, but nothing more."

"Oh, papa!"--impatiently--"think of it as you will, but listen to what I
have to say; for I am in trouble. You were sorry for me just now when
you imagined I was in love; try and understand what I say now, for I am
in distress. I cannot see through this question--what is the right and
what is the wrong."

"I do not think I understand you my dear," he said.

She had stopped, and leaned back on the roadside fence. He stood before
her. All around them the yellow golden-rod and mullein were waving in
the wind, and lithe young trees bent with their coloured leaves. Captain
Rexford looked at his daughter, and wondered, in his slow way, that she
was not content to be as fair and stately as the flowers without
perplexing herself thus.

"Papa, pray listen. You know that night when I went to seek
Winifred--you do not know, because I have not told you--but just before
the old man died. When he stood there, looking up and praying that our
Saviour would come again, there was not one of us who was not carried
away with the thought of that coming--the thought that when it comes all
time will be _present,_ not _past;_ and, papa, the clouds parted just a
little, and we saw through, beyond all the damp, dark gloom of the place
we were in, into a place of such perfect clearness and beauty beyond--I
can't explain it, but it seemed like an emblem of the difference that
would be between our muddy ways of thinking of things and the way that
we should think if we lived always for the sake of the time when He will
come--and it is very easy to talk of that difference in a large general
way, and it does no good--but to bring each particular thing to that
test is practical. Here, for instance, you and I ought to reconsider our
beliefs and prejudices as they regard