"There is strife in the kingdom, and it can not stand," said the doctor, with mingled assent and assertion. "Hence it is forever falling." "But it is forever renewed," she objected. "With what renewal?" rejoined Faber. "What return is there from the jaws of death? The individual is gone. A new consciousness is not a renewal of consciousness." She looked at him keenly. "It is hard, is it not?" she said. "I will not deny that in certain moods it looks so," he answered. She did not perceive his drift, and was feeling after it. "Surely," she said, "the thing that ought to be, is the thing that must be." "How can we tell that?" he returned. "What do we see like it in nature? Whatever lives and thrives--animal or vegetable--or human--it is all one--every thing that lives and thrives, is forever living and thriving on the loss, the defeat, the death of another. There is no unity save absolutely by means of destruction. Destruction is indeed the very center and framework of the sole existing unity. I will not, therefore, as some do, call Nature cruel: what right have I to complain? Nature can not help it. She is no more to blame for bringing me forth, than I am to blame for being brought forth. Ought is merely the reflex of like. We call ourselves the highest in Nature--and probably we are, being the apparent result of the whole--whence, naturally, having risen, we seek to rise, we feel after something we fancy higher. For as to the system in which we live, we are so ignorant that we can but blunderingly feel our way in it; and if we knew all its laws, we could neither order nor control, save by a poor subservience. We are the slaves of our circumstance, therefore betake ourselves to dreams of what _ought to be_." Miss Meredith was silent for a time. "I can not see how to answer you," she said at length. "But you do not disturb my hope of seeing my father again. We have a sure word of prophecy." Faber suppressed the smile of courteous contempt that was ready to break forth, and she went on: "It would ill become me to doubt to-day, as you will grant when I tell you a wonderful fact. This morning I had not money enough to buy myself the pair of strong shoes you told me I must wear. I had nothing left but a few trinkets of my mother's--one of them a ring I thought worth about ten pounds. I gave it to my landlady to sell for me, hoping she would get five for it. She brought me fifty, and I am rich!" Her last words trembled with triumph. He had himself been building her up in her foolish faith! But he took consolation in thinking how easily with a word he could any moment destroy that buttress of her phantom house. It was he, the unbeliever, and no God in or out of her Bible, that had helped her! It did not occur to him that she might after all see in him only a reed blown of a divine wind. "I am glad to hear of your good fortune," he answered. "I can not say I see how it bears on the argument. You had in your possession more than you knew."