In the splendor of the dawn, he fell into a troubled sleep, and a more troubled dream, which woke him again to misery.  Outside his chamber, the world was rich in light, in song, in warmth, in odor, in growth, in color, in space; inside, all was to him gloomy, groanful, cold, musty, ungenial, dingy, confined; yet there was he more at ease, shrunk from the light, and in the glorious morning that shone through the chinks of his shutters, saw but an alien common day, not the coach of his Father, come to carry him yet another stage toward his home.  He was in want of nothing at the moment.  There were no holes in the well-polished shoes that seemed to keep ghostly guard outside his chamber-door.  The clothes that lay by his bedside were indeed a little threadbare, but sound and spotless.  The hat that hung in the passage below might have been much shabbier without necessarily indicating poverty.  His walking-stick had a gold knob like any earl’s.  If he did choose to smoke a church-warden, he had a great silver-mounted meerschaum on his mantle-shelf.  True, the butcher’s shop had for some time contributed nothing to his dinners, but his vegetable diet agreed with him.  He would himself have given any man time, would as soon have taken his child by the throat as his debtor, had worshiped God after a bettering fashion for forty years at least, and yet would not give God time to do His best for him—­the best that perfect love, and power limited only by the lack of full consent in the man himself, could do.

His daughter always came into his room the first thing in the morning.  It was plain to her that he had been more restless than usual, and at sight of his glazy red-rimmed eyes and gray face, her heart sank within her.  For a moment she was half angry with him, thinking in herself that if she believed as he did, she would never trouble her heart about any thing:  her head should do all the business.  But with his faith, she would have done just the same as he, It is one thing to be so used to certain statements and modes of thought that you take all for true, and quite another so to believe the heart of it all, that you are in essential and imperturbable peace and gladness because of it.  But oh, how the poor girl sighed for the freedom of a God to trust in!  She could content herself with the husks the swine ate, if she only knew that a Father sat at the home-heart of the universe, wanting to have her.  Faithful in her faithlessness, she did her best to comfort her believing father:  beyond the love that offered it, she had but cold comfort to give.  He did not listen to a word she said, and she left him at last with a sigh, and went to get him his breakfast.  When she returned, she brought him his letters with his tea and toast.  He told her to take them away:  she might open them herself if she liked; they could be nothing but bills!  She might take the tray too; he did not want any breakfast:  what right had he to eat what he had no money to pay for!  There would