“I do not know what an allegory is, Dr. Sandford.”

“What is the meaning of the representation, then, as you think of it?”

“This last picture?”

“Yes.”

“It is a trial of skill, Dr. Sandford.”

The room was still darkened, and the glance of intelligence and amusement that passed between her friend and her father, their own eyes could scarcely catch.  Daisy did not see it.  But she had spoken diplomatically.  She did not want to come any nearer the subject of the picture in talking with Dr. Sandford.  His mind was different, and he went on.

“What is the trial of skill about, Daisy?”

The child hesitated, and then said, speaking low and most unchildlike—­

“It is about a human soul.”

“And what do you understand are the powers at work—­or at play?”

“It is not play,” said Daisy.

“Answer Dr. Sandford, Daisy,” said her father.

“Papa,” said the child, “it isn’t play.  The devil tries to make people do wrong—­and if they try to do right, then there is a—­”

“A what?”

“I don’t know—­a fight, papa.”

Mr. Randolph again felt a tremor, a nervous trembling, pass over Daisy.

“You do not suppose, my darling,” he said softly, “that such a fight goes on with anything like this horrible figure that your cousin Preston has made himself?”

“I do not suppose he looks like that, papa.”

“I do not think there is such a personage at all, Daisy.  I am sure you need not trouble your little head with thinking about it.”

Daisy made no answer.

“There is a struggle always going on, no doubt, between good and evil; but we cannot paint good and evil without imagining shapes for them.”

“But papa,—­” said Daisy, and stopped.  It was no place or time for talking about the matter, though her father spoke low.  She did not want even Dr. Sandford to hear.

“What is it, Daisy?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, “I should like to know what the argument is.”

“Papa,” said Daisy, awesomely,—­“there is a place prepared for the devil and his angels.”

Mr. Randolph was silent now.  But he felt again that Daisy was nervously excited, by the quiver that passed over her little frame.

“So you think, Daisy,” said the doctor leaning towards her,—­“that the white and the black spirits have a fight over the people of this world?”

Daisy hesitated, struggled, quivered, with the feeling and the excitement which were upon her, tried for self-command and words to answer.  Mr. Randolph saw it all and did not hurry her, though she hesitated a good deal.

“You think they have a quarrel for us?” repeated the doctor.

“I don’t know, Dr. Sandford—­” Daisy answered in a strangely tender and sober voice.  It was strange to her two hearers.

“But you believe in the white spirits, I suppose, as well as in the other branch of the connection?”