to God.
Nor do we yet at all understand the extraordinary influence exerted on
others by any steady, earnest concentration of thought; science is but
just awakening to the fact that there is an unknown power which we have
hitherto never dreamed of. I have great hope that in this direction, as
in all others, science may show us the hidden workings of our Father."

Erica forgot her anxiety for a moment; she was watching Charles Osmond's
face with mingled curiosity and perplexity. To speak to one whose belief
in the Unseen seemed stronger and more influential than most people's
belief in the seen, was always very strange to her, and with her prophet
she was almost always conscious of this double life (SHE considered it
double a real outer and an imaginary inner.) His strong conviction; the
every-day language which he used in speaking of those truths which
most people from a mistaken notion of reverence, wrap up in a sort of
ecclesiastical phraseology; above all, the carrying out in his life of
the idea of universal brotherhood, with so many a mere form of words all
served to impress Erica very deeply. She knew him too well and loved him
too truly to pause often, as it were, to analyze his character. Every
now and then, however, some new phase was borne in upon her, and some
chance word, emphasizing the difference between them, forced her from
sheer honesty to own how much that was noble seemed in him to be the
outcome of faith in Christ.

They went a little more deeply into the prayer question. Then, with the
wonder growing on her more and more, Erica suddenly exclaimed: "It is
so wonderful to me that you can believe without logical proof believe a
thing which affects your whole life so immensely, and yet be unable to
demonstrate the very existence of a God."

"Do you believe your father loves you?" asked Charles Osmond.

"My father! Why, of course."

"You can't logically prove that his love has any true existence."

"Why, yes!" exclaimed Erica. "Not a day passes without some word, look,
thought, which would prove it to any one. If there is one thing that I
am certain of in the whole world, it is that my father loves me. Why,
you who know him so well, you must know that! You must have seen that."

"All his care of you may be mere self-interest," said Charles Osmond.
"Perhaps he puts on a sort of appearance of affection for you just
for the sake of what people would say not a very likely thing for Mr.
Raeburn to cons