't mind her, Nellie," said Josie, softly, speaking for the first
time. "Connie laughs because if she didn't she would cry."

"I know that," said Nellie. "I don't mind her. Is there one of us who
does not feel what a curse living is?"

Geisner's firm voice answered: "And is there one of us who does not know
what a blessing living might be? Nellie, my girl, you are sad and
sorrowful, as we all are at times, and do not feel yet God in all working
itself out in unseen ways."

"God!" she answered, scornfully. "There is no God. How can there be?"

"I do not know. It is as one feels. I do not mean that petty god of
creeds and religions, the feeble image that coarse hands have made from
vague glimpses caught by those who were indeed inspired. I mean the total
force, the imperishable breath, of the universe. And of that breath, my
child, you and I and all things are part."

Stratton took his cigar from his mouth and quoted:

"'I am the breath of the lute, I am the mind of man, Gold's glitter, the
light of the diamond and the sea-pearl's lustre wan. I am both good and
evil, the deed and the deed's intent--Temptation, victim, sinner,
crime, pardon and punishment.'"

"Yes," said Geisner; "that and more. Brahma and more than Brahma. What
Prince Buddha thought out too. What Jesus the Carpenter dimly recognised.
Not only Force, but Purpose, or what for lack of better terms we call
Purpose, in it all."

"And that Purpose; what is it?" Ned was surprised to hear his own voice
uttering his thought.

"Who shall say? There are moments, a few moments, when one seems to feel
what it is, moments when one stands face to face with the universal Life
and realises wordlessly what it means." Geisner spoke with grave
solemnity. The others, hardly breathing, understood how this man had
thought these things out.

"When one is in anguish and sorrow unendurable. When one has seen one's
soul stripped naked and laid bare, with all its black abysses and
unnatural sins; the brutishness that is in each man's heart known and
understood--the cowardice, the treachery, the villainy, the lust. When
one knows oneself in others, and sinks into a mist of despair, hopeless
and heart-wrung, then come the temptations, as the prophets call them,
the miserable ambitions dressed as angels of light, the religions which
have become more drugged pain-lullers, the desire to suppress thought
altogether, to end life, to stupefy one's soul with bodily pain, with
ment