‘It got into the bed.’

‘You imagined it.’

’I didn’t imagine it.  I heard it crawl along the sheets, till it found a way between them, and then it crawled towards me.  And I felt it—­against my face.—­And it’s there now.’

‘Where?’

She raised the forefinger of her left hand.

‘There!—­Can’t you hear it droning?’

She listened, intently.  I listened too.  Oddly enough, at that instant the droning of an insect did become audible.

’It’s only a bee, child, which has found its way through the open window.’

’I wish it were only a bee, I wish it were.—­Sydney, don’t you feel as if you were in the presence of evil?  Don’t you want to get away from it, back into the presence of God?’

‘Marjorie!’

’Pray, Sydney, pray!—­I can’t!—­I don’t know why, but I can’t!

She flung her arms about my neck, and pressed herself against me in paroxysmal agitation.  The violence of her emotion bade fair to unman me too.  It was so unlike Marjorie,—­and I would have given my life to save her from a toothache.  She kept repeating her own words,—­as if she could not help it.

‘Pray, Sydney, pray!’

At last I did as she wished me.  At least, there is no harm in praying,—­I never heard of its bringing hurt to anyone.  I repeated aloud the Lord’s Prayer,—–­the first time for I know not how long.  As the divine sentences came from my lips, hesitatingly enough, I make no doubt, her tremors ceased.  She became calmer.  Until, as I reached the last great petition, ‘Deliver us from evil,’ she loosed her arms from about my neck, and dropped upon her knees, close to my feet.  And she joined me in the closing words, as a sort of chorus.

’For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever.  Amen.’

When the prayer was ended, we both of us were still.  She with her head bowed, and her hands clasped; and I with something tugging at my heart-strings which I had not felt there for many and many a year, almost as if it had been my mother’s hand;—­I daresay that sometimes she does stretch out her hand, from her place among the angels, to touch my heart-strings, and I know nothing of it all the while.

As the silence still continued, I chanced to glance up, and there was old Lindon peeping at us from his hiding-place behind the screen.  The look of amazed perplexity which was on his big red face struck me with such a keen sense of the incongruous that it was all I could do to keep from laughter Apparently the sight of us did nothing to lighten the fog which was in his brain, for he stammered out, in what was possibly intended for a whisper,

‘Is—­is she m-mad?’

The whisper,—­if it was meant for a whisper—­was more than sufficiently audible to catch his daughter’s ears.  She started—­ raised her head—­sprang to her feet—­turned—­and saw her father.

‘Papa!’