"Fudge!" Mrs. Dale interrupted, "as though it made the slightest difference how a man played a silly game! Don't be foolish, Henry. Lois has made a great mistake, but I suppose there is nothing to be done, unless young Forsythe should try again. I hope he will, and I hope she will have more sense." The rector was silent. He could not deny that he was disappointed, and as he went towards the post-office, he almost wished he had offered a word of advice to Lois. "Still, a girl needs her mother for that sort of thing, and, after all, perhaps it is best. For really, I should be very dull at the rectory without her." Thus he comforted himself for what was only a disappointment to his vanity, and was quite cheerful when he opened Helen's letter. The post-office was in that part of the drug-store where the herbs were kept, and the letters always had a faint smell of pennyroyal or wormwood about them. The rector read his letter, leaning against the counter, and crumpling some bay leaves between his fingers; and though he was interrupted half a dozen times by people coming for their mail, and stopping to gossip about the weather or the church, he gained a very uncomfortable sense of its contents. "More of this talk about belief," he grumbled, as he folded the last sheet, covered with the clear heavy writing, and struck it impatiently across his hand before he thrust it down into his pocket. "What in the world is John Ward thinking of to let her bother her head with such questions?" "I am surprised" Helen wrote, "to see how narrowness and intolerance seem to belong to intense belief. Some of these elders in John's church, especially a man called Dean (the father of my Alfaretta), believe in their horrible doctrines with all their hearts, and their absolute conviction make them blind to any possibility of good in any creed which does not agree with theirs. Apparently, they think they have reached the ultimate truth, and never even look for new light. That is the strangest thing to me. Now, for my part, I would not sign a creed to-day which I had written myself, because one lives progressively in religion as in everything else. But, after all, as I said to Gifford the other day, the _form_ of belief is of so little consequence. The main thing is to have the realization of God in one's own soul; it would be enough to have that, I should think. But to some of us God is only another name for the power of good,--or, one might as well say force, and that is blind and impersonal; there is nothing comforting or tender in the thought of force. How do you suppose the conviction of the personality of God is reached?" "All nonsense," said the rector, as he went home, striking out with his cane at the stalks of golden-rod standing stiff with frost at the roadside. "I shall tell Gifford he ought to know better than to have these discussions with her. Women don't understand such things; they go off at half cock, and think themselves skeptics. All nonsense!"