ined a very
uncomfortable sense of its contents.

"More of this talk about belief," he grumbled, as he folded the last
sheet, covered with the clear heavy writing, and struck it impatiently
across his hand before he thrust it down into his pocket. "What in the
world is John Ward thinking of to let her bother her head with such
questions?"

"I am surprised" Helen wrote, "to see how narrowness and intolerance seem
to belong to intense belief. Some of these elders in John's church,
especially a man called Dean (the father of my Alfaretta), believe in
their horrible doctrines with all their hearts, and their absolute
conviction make them blind to any possibility of good in any creed which
does not agree with theirs. Apparently, they think they have reached the
ultimate truth, and never even look for new light. That is the strangest
thing to me. Now, for my part, I would not sign a creed to-day which I
had written myself, because one lives progressively in religion as in
everything else. But, after all, as I said to Gifford the other day, the
_form_ of belief is of so little consequence. The main thing is to have
the realization of God in one's own soul; it would be enough to have
that, I should think. But to some of us God is only another name for the
power of good,--or, one might as well say force, and that is blind and
impersonal; there is nothing comforting or tender in the thought of
force. How do you suppose the conviction of the personality of God is
reached?"

"All nonsense," said the rector, as he went home, striking out with
his cane at the stalks of golden-rod standing stiff with frost at the
roadside. "I shall tell Gifford he ought to know better than to have
these discussions with her. Women don't understand such things; they go
off at half cock, and think themselves skeptics. All nonsense!"

But the rector need not have felt any immediate anxiety about his niece.
As yet such questions were only a sort of intellectual exercise; the time
had not come when they should be intensely real, and she should seek for
an answer with all the force of her life, and know the anguish of despair
which comes when a soul feels itself adrift upon a sea of unbelief. They
were not of enough importance to talk of to John, even if she had not
known they would trouble him; she and Gifford had merely spoken of them
as speculations of general interest; yet all the while they were shaping
and moulding her mind for the future.

But