he
prominent eyes of the mystic were veiled with strange glamour, and, with
divine _gourmandise_, she savoured the ineffable sweetness of the
vision, and, after a long silence, she said:

'I often wonder, Alice, how you can think as you do; and, strange to
say, no one suspects you are an unbeliever; you're so good in all except
that one point.'

'But surely, dear, it isn't a merit to believe; it is hardly a thing
that we can call into existence.'

'You should pray for faith.'

'I don't see how I can pray if I haven't faith.'

'You're too clever; but I would ask you, Alice--you never told me--did
you never believe in God, I mean when you were a little child?'

'I suppose I must have, but, as well as I can remember, it was only in a
very half-hearted way. I could never quite bring myself to credit that
there was a Being far away, sitting behind a cloud, who kept his eye on
all the different worlds, and looked after them just as a stationmaster
looks after the arrival and departure of trains from some great
terminus.'

'Alice! how can you talk so? Aren't you afraid that something awful
might happen to you for talking of the Creator of all things in that
way?'

'Why should I be afraid, and why should that Being, if he exists, be
angry with me for my sincerity? If he be all-powerful, it rests with
himself to make me believe.'

They had now accomplished the greater part of their journey, and, a
little tired, had sat down to rest on a portion of a tree left by the
woodcutters. Gold rays slanted through the glades, enveloping and
rounding off the tall smooth trunks that rose branchless to a height of
thirty, even forty, feet; and the pink clouds, seen through the arching
dome of green, were vague as the picture on some dim cathedral-roof.

'In places like these, I wonder you don't feel God's presence.'

'On the contrary, the charm of nature is broken when we introduce a
ruling official.'

'Alice! how can you--you who are so good--speak in that way?' At that
moment a dead leaf rustled through the silence--'And do you think that
we shall die like that leaf? That, like it, we shall become a part of
the earth and be forgotten as utterly?'

'I am afraid I do. That dead, fluttering thing was once a bud; it lived
the summer-life of a leaf; now it will decay through the winter, and
perhaps the next, until it finally becomes part of the earth. Everything
in nature I see pursuing the same course; why should I imagine mys