I to complain?  Nature can not help it.  She is no more to blame for bringing me forth, than I am to blame for being brought forth.  Ought is merely the reflex of like.  We call ourselves the highest in Nature—­and probably we are, being the apparent result of the whole—­whence, naturally, having risen, we seek to rise, we feel after something we fancy higher.  For as to the system in which we live, we are so ignorant that we can but blunderingly feel our way in it; and if we knew all its laws, we could neither order nor control, save by a poor subservience.  We are the slaves of our circumstance, therefore betake ourselves to dreams of what ought to be.”

Miss Meredith was silent for a time.

“I can not see how to answer you,” she said at length.  “But you do not disturb my hope of seeing my father again.  We have a sure word of prophecy.”

Faber suppressed the smile of courteous contempt that was ready to break forth, and she went on: 

“It would ill become me to doubt to-day, as you will grant when I tell you a wonderful fact.  This morning I had not money enough to buy myself the pair of strong shoes you told me I must wear.  I had nothing left but a few trinkets of my mother’s—­one of them a ring I thought worth about ten pounds.  I gave it to my landlady to sell for me, hoping she would get five for it.  She brought me fifty, and I am rich!”

Her last words trembled with triumph.  He had himself been building her up in her foolish faith!  But he took consolation in thinking how easily with a word he could any moment destroy that buttress of her phantom house.  It was he, the unbeliever, and no God in or out of her Bible, that had helped her!  It did not occur to him that she might after all see in him only a reed blown of a divine wind.

“I am glad to hear of your good fortune,” he answered.  “I can not say I see how it bears on the argument.  You had in your possession more than you knew.”

“Does the length of its roots alter the kind of the plant?” she asked.  “Do we not know in all nature and history that God likes to see things grow?  That must be the best way.  It may be the only right way.  If that ring was given to my mother against the time when the last child of her race should find herself otherwise helpless, would the fact that the provision was made so early turn the result into a mere chance meeting of necessity and subsidy?  Am I bound to call every good thing I receive a chance, except an angel come down visibly out of the blue sky and give it to me?  That would be to believe in a God who could not work His will by His own laws.  Here I am, free and hopeful—­all I needed.  Every thing was dark and troubled yesterday; the sun is up to-day.”

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,” said the doctor.

“I begin to fear you mean what you say, Mr. Faber.  I hoped it was only for argument’s sake,” returned Miss Meredith.