o fall down, and then punish it for falling? The child did
not ask to be put there. So God puts us here, where we must sin; would it
be just to punish us eternally for his own work?"

Alfaretta shook her head, and sighed. "Well, I don't know but yer right,
though the preacher don't say so."

Helen did not speak for a moment, and then said quietly, "Perhaps
not,--not yet; but he will say so some day. He is so good himself, you
know, Alfaretta, he cannot bear to think every one else does not love and
serve God, too; and it seems to him as though they ought to be punished
if they don't."

This was a very lame explanation, but it closed the discussion, and she
hurried away from the honest, searching eyes of her servant, which she
felt must see through the flimsy excuse. Her eyes burned with sudden
tears that blurred the white landscape, it hurt her to excuse her
husband's belief even to herself, and gave her a feeling of disloyalty to
him: for a moment she weakly longed to creep into the shelter of the
monstrous error in which she felt he lived, that they might be one there,
as in everything else. "Yet it does not matter," she said to herself,
smiling a little. "We love each other. We know we don't think alike on
doctrinal points, but we love each other."

She stopped a moment at the lumber-yard. The ghastly blackness of the
ruin glared against the snow-covered hills and the dazzling blue of the
sky; here and there a puff of steam showed where the melting snow on the
cooler beams dripped on the hot embers below. Some scattered groups of
lumbermen and their forlorn wives braved the cold, and stood talking the
fire over, for, after all, it was the immediate interest; death would not
come to them for years, perhaps, but where were they going to get money
for their families during the spring? There could be no rafting down the
river until after the loggers had brought their rafts from up in the
mountains, to be sawed into planks.

Alfaretta's father, who stood contemplating the ruins, and moralizing
when any one would stop to listen to him, had pointed this out. Mr. Dean
was a carpenter, and kept a grocery store as well, so he could pity the
lumbermen from the shelter of comparative affluence. When he saw the
preacher's wife, he came over to speak to her.

"Well, ma'am," he said, "the dispensations of Providence is indeed
mysterious,--that the river should have been froze last night!"

Mr. Dean had a habit of holding his