“I dream,” he said, “and I keep on dreaming that you can walk and I can see.  What do you suppose it means?  I never dreamed it before.”

“We all have dreams, Daddy.  I’ve had the same one very often ever since I was a little child.  It’s about a tower made of cologne bottles, with a cupola of lovely glass arches, built on the white sand by the blue sea.  Inside is a winding stairway hung with tapestries, leading to the cupola where the golden bells are.  There are lovely rooms on every floor, and you can stop wherever you please.”

“It sounds like a song,” he mused.

“Perhaps it is.  Can’t you make one of it?”

“No—­we each have to make our own.  I made one this morning.”

“Tell me, please.”

[Sidenote:  Love Never Lost]

“It is about love.  When God made the world, He put love in, and none of it has ever been lost.  It is simply transferred from one person to another.  Sometimes it takes a different form, and becomes a deed, which, at first, may not look as if it were made of love, but, in reality, is.

“Love blossoms in flowers, sings in moving waters, fills the forest with birds, and makes all the wonderful music of Spring.  It puts the colour upon the robin’s breast, scents the orchard with far-reaching drifts of bloom, and scatters the pink and white petals over the grass beneath.  Through love the flower changes to fruit, and the birds sing lullabies at twilight instead of mating songs.

“It is at the root of everything good in all the world, and where things are wrong, it is only because sometime, somewhere, there has not been enough love.  The balance has been uneven and some have had too much while others were starving for it.  As the lack of food stunts the body, so the denial of love warps the soul.

“But God has made it so that love given must unfailingly come back an hundred-fold; the more we give, the richer we are.  And Heaven is only a place where the things that have gone wrong here will at last come right.  Is it not so, Barbara?”

“Surely, Daddy.”

“Then,” he continued, anxiously, “all my loving must come back to me sometime, somewhere.  I think it will be right, for God Himself is Love.”

The blind man’s sensitive fingers lovingly sought Barbara’s face.  His touch was a caress.  “I am sure you are like your dear mother,” he said, softly.  “If I could know that she died loving me, and if I could see her face again, just for an instant, why, all the years of loving, with no answer, would be fully repaid.”

“She loved you, Daddy—­I know she did.”

[Sidenote:  The Old Doubt]

“I know, too, but not always.  Sometimes the old, tormenting doubt comes back to me.”

“It shouldn’t—­mother would never have meant you to doubt her.”