“No, I don’t—­if you call this making.  Why does He do it?  He could have avoided all this trouble by leaving us alone.”

“I put something like the same question once to Mr. Wingfold,” said Dorothy, “and he told me it was impossible to show any one the truths of the kingdom of Heaven; he must learn them for himself.  ’I can do little more,’ he said, ’than give you my testimony that it seems to me all right.  If God has not made you good, He has made you with the feeling that you ought to be good, and at least a half-conviction that to Him you have to go for help to become good.  When you are good, then you will know why He did not make you good at first, and will be perfectly satisfied with the reason, because you will find it good and just and right—­so good that it was altogether beyond the understanding of one who was not good.  I don’t think,’ he said, ’you will ever get a thoroughly satisfactory answer to any question till you go to Himself for it—­and then it may take years to make you fit to receive, that is to understand the answer.’  Oh Juliet! sometimes I have felt in my heart as if—­I am afraid to say it, even to you,—­”

“I shan’t be shocked at any thing; I am long past that,” sighed Juliet.

“It is not of you I am afraid,” said Dorothy.  “It is a kind of awe of the universe I feel.  But God is the universe; His is the only ear that will hear me; and He knows my thoughts already.  Juliet, I feel sometimes as if I must be good for God’s sake; as if I was sorry for Him, because He has such a troublesome nursery of children, that will not or can not understand Him, and will not do what He tells them, and He all the time doing the very best for them He can.”

“It may be all very true, or all great nonsense, Dorothy, dear; I don’t care a bit about it.  All I care for is—­I don’t know what I care for—­I don’t care for any thing any more—­there is nothing left to care for.  I love my husband with a heart like to break—­oh, how I wish it would!  He hates and despises me and I dare not wish that he wouldn’t.  If he were to forgive me quite, I should yet feel that he ought to despise me, and that would be all the same as if he did, and there is no help.  Oh, how horrid I look to him!  I can’t bear it.  I fancied it was all gone; but there it is, and there it must be forever.  I don’t care about a God.  If there were a God, what would He be to me without my Paul?”

“I think, Juliet, you will yet come to say, ’What would my Paul be to me without my God?’ I suspect we have no more idea than that lonely fly on the window there, what it would be to have a God.”

“I don’t care.  I would rather go to hell with my Paul than go to Heaven without him,” moaned Juliet.

“But what if God should be the only where to find your Paul?” said Dorothy.  “What if the gulf that parts you is just the gulf of a God not believed in—­a universe which neither of you can cross to meet the other—­just because you do not believe it is there at all?”