“I will only hammer nails in wood,” he said gravely. “How do you mean?” asked Cecil, not quite seeing the connection. “Not into the tables and chairs,” said Lance, who had clearly transgressed in this matter, and had applied the story to his own life with amusing simplicity. “That’s right,” said Cecil. “God will be pleased if you try.” “He can see us, but we can’t see him,” said Lance, in his sweet childish tones, quietly telling forth in implicit trust the truth that many a man longs to believe. A minute after he came dancing out into the garden, his short, sunny curls waving in the summer wind, his cheeks glowing, his hazel eyes and innocent little mouth beaming with happiness. “He looks like an incarnate smile,” thought Frithiof. And then he remembered what Roy had told him of the father and mother, and he thought how much trouble awaited the poor child, and felt the same keen wish that Cecil had felt that he might be brought up in a way which should make him able to resist whatever evil tendencies he had inherited. “If anything can save him it will be such a home as this,” he reflected. Then, as Cecil came out into the veranda, he joined her, and they walked together down one of the shady garden paths. “I overheard your pupil this morning,” he began, and they laughed together over the child’s quaint remarks. “That was very good, his turning the story to practical account all by himself. He is a lucky little beggar to have you for his teacher. I wonder what makes a child so ready to swallow quite easily the most difficult things in heaven and earth?” “I suppose because he knows he can’t altogether understand, and is willing to take things on trust,” said Cecil. “If anything can keep him straight when he grows up it will be what you have taught him,” said Frithiof. “You wonder that I admit that, and a year ago I couldn’t have said as much, but I begin to think that there is after all a very great restraining power in the old faith. The difficulty is to get up any sort of interest in that kind of thing.” “You talk as if it were a sort of science,” said Cecil. “That is precisely what it seems to me; and just as one man is born with a love of botany, another takes naturally to astronomy, and a third has no turn for science whatever, but is fond of hunting and fishing, so it seems to me with religion. All of you, perhaps, have inherited the tendency from your Puritan forefathers, but I have inherited quite the opposite tendency from my Viking ancestors. Like them, I prefer to love my friend and hate my enemy, and go through life in the way that best pleases me. I am not a reading man; I can’t get up the faintest sort of interest in these religious matters.” “We are talking of two different things,” said Cecil. “It is of the mere framework of religion that you are speaking. Very likely many of us are born without any taste for theology, or sermons, or Church history. We are not bound surely to force up an interest in them.”