"I think it is beautiful," Connie said softly, and her lips drooped a little, and a wistful pathos crept into her voice. "It seems so sad. I keep wishing I could cry about it. There's nothing really sad in it, I think it is supposed to be rather jovial, but--it seems terrible to me, even when it is the most beautiful. Part of it I don't understand very well." He held out a hand to Connie, and she put her own in it confidently. Carol, too, came and stood close beside him. "Yes," he said, "it is beautiful, Connie, and it is very terrible. We can't understand it fully because we can't feel what he felt. It is a groping poem, a struggling for light when one is stumbling in darkness." He looked thoughtfully at the girls. "He was a marvelous man, that Khayyam,--years ahead of his people, and his time. He was big enough to see the idiocy of the heathen ideas of God, he was beyond them, he spurned them. But he was not quite big enough to reach out, alone, and get hold of our kind of a God. He was reaching out, he was struggling, but he couldn't quite catch hold. It is a wonderful poem. It shows the weakness, the helplessness of a gifted man who has nothing to cling to. I think it will do you good to read it, Connie. Read it again and again, and thank God, my child, that though you are only a girl, you have the very thing this man, this genius, was craving. We admire his talent, but we pity his weakness. You will feel sorry for him. You read it, too, Carol. You'll like it. We can't understand it, as I say, because we are so sure of our God, that we can't feel what he felt, having nothing. But we can feel the heart-break, the fear, the shrinking back from the Providence that he called Fate,--of course it makes you want to cry, Connie. It is the saddest poem in the world." Connie's eyes were very bright. She winked hard a few times, choking back the rush of tears. Then with an impulsiveness she did not often show, she lifted her father's hand and kissed it passionately. "Oh, father," she whispered, "I was so afraid--you wouldn't quite see." She kissed his hand again. Carol looked at her sister respectfully. "Connie," she said, "I certainly beg your pardon. I just wanted to be clever, and didn't know what I was talking about. When you have finished it, give it to me, will you? I want to read it, too; I think it must be wonderful." She held out a slender shapely hand and Connie took it quickly, chummily, and the two girls turned toward the door. "The danger in reading things," said Mr. Starr, and they paused to listen, "the danger is that we may find arguments we can not answer; we may feel that we have been in the wrong, that what we read is right. There's the danger. Whenever you find anything like that, Connie, will you bring it to me? I think I can find the answer for you. If I don't know it, I will look until I come upon it. For we have been given an answer to every argument. You'll come to me, won't you?"