lies."

"And as the fool dies, so dies the wise man; and there is one account
to the righteous and to the wicked. And a man has no pre-eminence over
a beast, for both turn alike to dust; and Solomon does not know,
he says, or any one else, anything about the whole matter, or even
whether there be any life after death at all; and so, he says, the
only wise thing is to leave such deep questions alone, for Him who
made us to settle in His own way, and just to fear God and keep His
commandments, and do the work which lies nearest us with all our
might."

Grace was silent.

"You are surprised to hear me quote Scripture, and well you may be:
but that same book of Ecclesiastes is a very old favourite with me;
for I am no Christian, but a worlding, if ever there was one. But it
does puzzle me why you, who are a Christian, should talk one half-hour
as you have been talking to that poor girl, and the next go
for information about the next life to poor old disappointed,
broken-hearted Solomon, with his three hundred and odd idolatrous
wives, who confesses fairly that this life is a failure, and that he
does not know whether there is any next life at all."

Whether Tom was altogether right or not, is not the question here; the
novelist's business is to represent the real thoughts of mankind, when
they are not absolutely unfit to be told; and certainly Tom spoke the
doubts of thousands when he spoke his own.

Grace was silent still.

"Well," he said, "beyond that I can't go, being no theologian. But
when a preacher tells people in one breath of a God who so loves men
that He gave His own Son to save them, and in the next, that the same
God so hates men that He will cast nine-tenths of them into hopeless
torture for ever,--(and if that is not hating, I don't know what
is),--unless he, the preacher, gets a chance of talking to them for a
few minutes--Why, I should like, Miss Harvey, to put that gentleman
upon a real fire for ten minutes, instead of his comfortable Sunday's
dinner, which stands ready frying for him, and which he was going home
to eat, as jolly as if all the world was not going to destruction; and
there let him feel what fire was like, and reconsider his statements."

Grace looked up at him no more; but walked on in silence, pondering
many things.

"Howsoever that may be, sir, tell me what to do in this cholera, and I
will do it, if I kill myself with work or infection!"

"You shan't do that. We cannot spare