“My dear, I think you hardly realise how unwise it is to think of friendship between yourself and any such man; recognition of worth there may be, but nothing more.”

“Oh, papa!”—­impatiently—­“think of it as you will, but listen to what I have to say; for I am in trouble.  You were sorry for me just now when you imagined I was in love; try and understand what I say now, for I am in distress.  I cannot see through this question—­what is the right and what is the wrong.”

“I do not think I understand you my dear,” he said.

She had stopped, and leaned back on the roadside fence.  He stood before her.  All around them the yellow golden-rod and mullein were waving in the wind, and lithe young trees bent with their coloured leaves.  Captain Rexford looked at his daughter, and wondered, in his slow way, that she was not content to be as fair and stately as the flowers without perplexing herself thus.

“Papa, pray listen.  You know that night when I went to seek Winifred—­you do not know, because I have not told you—­but just before the old man died.  When he stood there, looking up and praying that our Saviour would come again, there was not one of us who was not carried away with the thought of that coming—­the thought that when it comes all time will be present, not past; and, papa, the clouds parted just a little, and we saw through, beyond all the damp, dark gloom of the place we were in, into a place of such perfect clearness and beauty beyond—­I can’t explain it, but it seemed like an emblem of the difference that would be between our muddy ways of thinking of things and the way that we should think if we lived always for the sake of the time when He will come—­and it is very easy to talk of that difference in a large general way, and it does no good—­but to bring each particular thing to that test is practical.  Here, for instance, you and I ought to reconsider our beliefs and prejudices as they regard this man we are talking about, and find out what part of them, in God’s sight, is pure and strong and to be maintained, and what part is unworthy and to be cast away.  Is it easy, even in such a small matter as this?”

Captain Rexford took off his hat in tribute to his theme, and stood bareheaded.  He looked what he was—­a military man of the past and more formal generation, who with difficulty had adapted himself to the dress and habits of a farmer.  He was now honestly doing his utmost to bring himself to something still more foreign to his former experience.

“To put it in a practical way, papa:  if our Lord were coming to-morrow, how would you advise me to meet Alec Trenholme to-day?”

“Of course,” began Captain Rexford, “in sight of the Almighty all men are equal.”

“No, no,” she pleaded, “by all that is true, men are not equal nor are occupations equal.  Everything has its advantages and disadvantages.  It is not as well to be stupid as to be wise, to be untaught as to be taught, to be ugly as to be beautiful; it is not as good to kill cattle as to till the soil, and it is not as good to be a farmer as to be a poet.  It is just because moralists go too far, and say what is not true, that they fail.  External things are of more importance to their Creator than they are even to us.”