Meynell's gaze was fixed intently on his questioner. The night-light in the basin on the farther side of the room threw the strong features into shadowy relief, illumining the yearning kindliness of the eyes. "What made tha believe in Him?" "My own life--my own struggles--and sins--and sufferings," said Meynell, stooping toward the sick man, and speaking each word with an intensity behind which lay much that could never be known to his questioner. "A good man, Bateson, put it once in this way, 'There is something in me that asks something of me.' That's easy to understand, isn't it? If a man wants to be filthy, or drunken, or cruel, there is always a voice within--it may be weak or it may be strong--that asks of him to be--instead--pure and sober and kind. And perhaps he denies the Voice, refuses it--talks it down--again and again. Then the joy in his life dies out bit by bit, and the world turns to dust and ashes. Every time that he says No to the Voice he is less happy--he has less power of being happy. And the voice itself dies away--and death comes. But now, suppose he turns to the Voice and says 'Lead me--I follow!' And suppose he obeys, like a child stumbling. Then every time he stretches and bends his poor weak will so as to give _It_ what it asks, his heart is happy; and strength comes--the strength to do more and do better. _It_ asks him to love--to love men and women, not with lust, but with pure love; and as he obeys, as he loves--he _knows_--he knows that it is God asking, and that God has come to him and abides with him. So when death overtakes him he trusts himself to God as he would to his best friend." "Tha'rt talkin' riddles, Rector!" "No. Ask yourself. When you fell into sin with that woman, did nothing speak to you, nothing try to stop you?" The bright half-mocking eyes below Meynell's wandered a little--wavered in expression. "It was the hot blood in me--aye, an' in her too. Yo cawn't help them things." "Can't you? When your wife suffered, didn't that touch you? Wouldn't you undo it now if you could?" "Aye--because I'm goin'--doctor says I'm done for." "No--well or ill--wouldn't you undo it--wouldn't you undo the blows you gave your wife--the misery you caused her?" "Mebbe. But I cawn't." "No--not in my sense or yours. But in God's sense you can. Turn your heart--ask Him to give you love--love to Him, who has been pleading with you all your life--love to your wife, and your fellow men--love--and repentance--and faith." Meynell's voice shook. He was in an anguish at what seemed to him the weakness, the ineffectiveness, of his pleading. A silence. Then the voice rose again from the bed. "Dost tha believe in Jesus Christ, Rector? Mr. Barron, he calls tha an infidel. But he hasn't read the books you an' I have read, I'll uphold yer!" The dying man raised his hand to the bookshelves beside him with a proud gesture.