“That man haunts me. I cannot bear the thought of him; and yet I cannot get rid of him. I am sure he is a bad man. Are you certain he is not here?” “Yes, indeed, my lady. He has not been here since the day before yesterday.” “And yet when you leave me for an instant, I always feel as if he were sitting in the very seat where you were the moment before, or just coming to the door and about to open it. That is why I cannot bear you to leave me.” Margaret might have confessed to some slighter sensations of the same kind; but they did not oppress her as they did Lady Emily. “God is nearer to you than any thought or feeling of yours, Lady Emily. Do not be afraid. If all the evil things in the universe were around us, they could not come inside the ring that he makes about us. He always keeps a place for himself and his child, into which no other being can enter.” “Oh! how you must love God, Margaret!” “Indeed I do love him, my lady. If ever anything looks beautiful or lovely to me, then I know at once that God is that.” “But, then, what right have we to take the good of that, however true it is, when we are not beautiful ourselves?” “That only makes God the more beautiful—in that he will pour out the more of his beauty upon us to make us beautiful. If we care for his glory, we shall be glad to believe all this about him. But we are too anxious about feeling good ourselves, to rejoice in his perfect goodness. I think we should find that enough, my lady. For, if he be good, are not we his children, and sure of having it, not merely feeling it, some day?” Here Margaret repeated a little poem of George Herbert’s. She had found his poems amongst Mrs. Elton’s books, who, coming upon her absorbed in it one day, had made her a present of the volume. Then indeed Margaret had found a friend. The poem is called Dialogue: “Sweetest Saviour, if my soul Were but worth the having—” “Oh, what a comfort you are to me, Margaret!” Lady Emily said, after a short silence. “Where did you learn such things?” “From my father, and from Jesus Christ, and from God himself, showing them to me in my heart.” “Ah! that is why, as often as you come into my room, even if I am very troubled, I feel as if the sun shone, and the wind blew, and the birds sang, and the tree-tops went waving in the wind, as they used to do before I was taken ill—I mean before they thought I must go abroad. You seem to make everything clear, and right, and plain. I wish I were you, Margaret.”