"Oh, please don't!" pleaded Letty, as if he had been threatening her with a small amputation, or the loss of a front tooth. "Yes," he persisted; "and not your brains only, Letty, but your heart, and all that is in you." At this even Mary could not help feeling a little frightened; and she was glad there was no occasion for her to speak. With just a word of introduction, Godfrey read Carlyle's translation of that finest of Jean Paul's dreams in which he sets forth the condition of a godless universe all at once awakened to the knowledge of the causelessness of its own existence. Slowly, with due inflection and emphasis--slowly, but without pause for thought or explanation--he read to the end, ceased suddenly, and lifted his eyes. "There, Letty," he said, "what do you think of that? There's a bit of Sunday reading for you!" Letty was looking altogether perplexed, and not a little frightened. "I don't understand a word of it," she answered, gulping back her tears. He glanced at Mary. She was white as death, her lips quivered, and from her eyes shot a keen light that seemed to lacerate their blue. "It is terrible!" she said. "I never read anything like that." "There _is_ nothing like it," he answered. "But the author is a Unitarian, is he not?" remarked Mary--for she heard plenty of theology, if not much Christianity, in her chapel. Godfrey looked at her, then at the book for a moment. "That may merely seem, from the necessity of the supposition," he answered; and read again: "'Now sank from aloft a noble, high Form, with a look of uneffaceable sorrow, down to the Altar, and all the Dead cried out, "Christ! is there no God?" He answered, "There is none!" The whole Shadow of each then shuddered, not the breast alone; and one after the other all, in this shuddering, shook into pieces.'--"You see," he went on, "that if there be no God, Christ can only be the first of men." "I understand," said Mary. "Do you really then, Mary?" said Letty, looking at her with wondering admiration. "I only meant," answered Mary--"but," she went on, interrupting herself, "I do think I understand it a little. If Mr. Wardour would be kind enough to read it through again!" "With much pleasure," answered Godfrey, casting on her a glance of pleased surprise. The second reading affected Mary more than the first--because, of course, she took in more. And this time a glimmer of meaning broke on the slower mind of Letty: as her cousin read the passage, "Oh, then came, fearful for the heart, the dead Children who had been awakened in the Churchyard, into the temple, and cast themselves before the high Form on the Altar, and said, 'Jesus, have we no Father?' And he answered, with streaming tears: 'We are all orphans, I and you; we are without Father!'"--at this point Letty gave her little cry, then bit her lip, as if she had said something wrong. All the time a great bee kept buzzing in and out of the arbor, and Mary vaguely wondered how it could be so careless.