Alick’s lip quivered.  “You are so good,” he said.

“Am I?” asked Leam seriously.

Then something passed over her face, a kind of gray shadow of remembrance, and she dropped her eyes.  Was she good? and could he think so?

A silence fell between them, and each knew of what the other was thinking; then Leam said suddenly, to break that terrible silence, which she felt was more betraying than even speech would have been, “I am sorry you have been so ill.  How dreadfully ill you have been!”

“Yes,” he said, “I have been bad enough, I believe, but by God’s grace I have been spared.”

“It would have been more grace not to have let you get ill in the beginning,” said Leam gravely.

Alick looked distressed.  Should he never Christianize this pagan?  “Don’t say that, dear,” he remonstrated.  “We must not call in question His will.”

“Things are things,” said Leam with her quiet positiveness.  “If they are bad, they are bad, whoever sends them.”

“No.  God cannot send us evil,” cried Alick.

“Then He does not send us disease or sorrow,” answered Leam.  “If He does, it is silly to say they are good, or that He is kind to make us ill and wretched.  I cannot tell stories.  And all you people do.”

“Leam, you pain me so much when you talk like this.  It is bad, dear—­impious and unchristian.  Ah! can I never bring you to the true way?” he cried with real pain.

“You cannot make me tell stories or talk nonsense because you say it is religious,” replied Leam, impervious and unconvinced.  “I like better to tell the truth and call things by their right names.”

“And you cannot feel that we are little children walking in the dark and that we must accept by faith?” said Alick.

She shook her head, then answered with a certain tone of triumph in her voice, “Well, yes, it is the dark:  so let it be the dark, and do not pretend you understand when you do not.  Do not say God made you ill in one breath, and in another that He is kind.  It is silly.”

“Now, my boy, don’t excite yourself,” said Mrs. Corfield, bustling into the room and noting how the thin cheek had flushed and how bright and feverish the hollow eyes of her invalid were looking.  “You know the doctor says you are not to be excited or tired.  It is the worst thing in the world for you.”

“I am neither, mother:  don’t alarm yourself,” he answered; “but I must have a little talk with Leam.  I have not seen her for so long.  How long is it, mother?”

“Well, my dear, you have been ill for over ten weeks,” she said as she went to the window with a sudden gasp.

“Ten weeks gone out of my life!” he replied.

“We have all been sorry,” said Leam a little vaguely.

His eyes grew moist.  He was weak and easily moved.  “Were you very sorry?” he asked.

“Very,” she answered, for her quite warmly.