d seemed no
longer utterly remote and impossible to belief, and I believed. And
whether this be true or false, I know one thing: this faith has made me
a better man than I should have been without it. My beloved father, wise
and kind, has seemed to lead me by the hand. I have not dared in the
knowledge of his sleepless love to do many things to which I have been
tempted. I have learned from him to know--if I know anything--that
life from its lowest form is a striving upward through uncounted and
innumerable grades, and that in each grade something is learned that
fits us for the next, or something lost which has to be won back again
after a great purgation of pain and repentance.

'It is three days since I began to write, and I am so weak that I can
barely hold the pen. Send this to Paul He has gone far wrong. He will
come back again to the right. I have asked that I may guide him, and my
prayer has been granted. From the hour at which I quit this flesh
until he joins me my work is appointed me, and I shall not leave him.
Good-bye, dear child Be at peace, for all will yet be well.

'When Paul sees these last words of mine, he will know that I am with
him.'

Thus, word for word, he went over it all again, for the hundredth time
or more, and on a sudden his soul seemed to flow from him in a great
longing. He rose unconsciously, and stepped beyond the doorway of his
tent, and stretched his arms wide to the night.

'Be with me! oh! be with me, and let me know and feel that you are here.'
If it be madness to believe so, I will not care!'

But that thought froze him. What right had he to welcome madness? Of
what avail was it to crown a wasted life with such a folly?

'You believed it, dear old dad?' he said. 'But how shall I? Can I dodge
myself? Can I slink by a side-road out of sight of my own intelligence?'

He stood long with dejected head and drooping hands, and then groping
his way back to his couch, lay down again.

And his dreams came back to him.

He was suddenly afire over a new idea for a comedy, and from the rising
of the sun to the going down of the same he slaved at it and exulted
in it day by day. He made long tramps into the country and lost himself
continuously. Pretty generally he awoke from his fancies to find himself
ravenously hungry, and without so much as a hint of an orient in his
mind. But almost any village or hamlet was good for bread, of a sort,
and for trustworthy eggs and new milk; and h