Presently, tired of asking herself, she turned to asking Heaven, which is easier. For we cannot comfortably blame ourselves for the inability to answer our own inconvenient inquiries, but Heaven we can both ask and blame. Serene had never troubled Heaven much before, but now, in desperation, she battered at its portals night and day. She did not pray, you understand, to be given the love which many small signs had taught her to believe might be hers, the love that, nevertheless, had not come near to her. Though young, she was reasonable. She instinctively recognized that when we cannot be happy it is necessary for us to be comfortable, if we are still to live. So, after a week or two of rebellion, she asked for peace, sure that if it existed for her anywhere in the universe, God held it in His keeping, for, now, no mortal did. She prayed as she went about her work by day; she prayed as she knelt by her window at evening, looking out on the star-lit world; she prayed when she woke late in the night and found her room full of the desolate white light of the waning moon, and always the same prayer. “Lord,” said Serene, “this is a little thing that I am going through. Make me feel that it is a little thing. Make me stop caring. But if you _can’t_, then show me that you care that I am not happy. If I could feel you knew and cared, I think I might be happier.” But in her heart she felt no answer, and peace did not come to fill the place of happiness. In our most miserable hours fantastic troubles and apprehensions of the impossible often come to heap themselves upon our real griefs, making up a load which is heavier than we can bear. Serene began to wonder if God heard--if He was there at all. Her people noticed that she grew thin and tired-looking, and attributed it to the fierce hot weather. For it was the strange summer long remembered in the inland country where they lived as the season of the great drought. There had been a heavy snowfall late in April; from that time till late in August no rain fell. The heat was terrible. Dust was everywhere. The passage of time from one scorching week to another was measured by the thickening of its heavy inches on the highway; it rose in clouds about the feet of cattle in the burnt-up clover-fields. The roadside grass turned to tinder, and where a careless match had been dropped, or the ashes shaken from a pipe, there were long, black stretches of seared ground to tell the tale. The resurrection of the dead seemed no greater miracle than these blackened fields should shortly turn to living green again, under the quiet influence of autumn rains.