“I have been wanting to talk to you often before about that,” he said, “so let me say once and for all what is in my mind. I disagree with you, as you know, vitally, essentially, and I believe that God tells me to disagree. But now I believe also, dear,--and this your goodness and your sweet patience all these months has taught me,--that God tells you to do as you are going to. How that is I do not understand. Perhaps that doesn’t matter so much as I used to think. But He fulfils Himself in many ways. And there, too, I have very often thought that He had to fulfil Himself in my way. It is you who have made me see that, I think.” Helen raised shining eyes to his. “You have made me very happy,” she said. “And what have you done for me? There were certain days, dear, during this winter which I do not see how I could have got through without you.” Here was an opportunity for which Helen had often sought. “Martin?” she asked. “Oh, father, I wonder if you want Martin as much as I do.” The strength and the tenderness died out of his face, leaving it both helpless and hard. “I can’t see him,” he said, quickly; “I dare not. Some day, perhaps; but if I saw him now I should say--I could not, I know, help saying--what I feel. If that would do any good, I would say it; but it would do none. I should only--I should only frighten him,” he said, with an accent infinitely pathetic. * * * * * She left him then without more words, for all this winter she had been learning every day and all day long the divine and human gospel of patience in dealing with people,--the patience that teaches us not to pull buds open, however desirable it may be that the flower should unfold, that is content to do its best with them, and wait for results without the desire even that they should come quickly. Till this evening, as has been said, Martin’s name had scarcely been mentioned by his father, and it was something, after this bitterness of long silence, that he should be able to say “Not yet, not now.” Pity also, pity with hands of healing, had entered at last into that stern, upright, God-fearing soul, filtering its way like water through dry and stony soil; a very exiguous trickle it might be, but cool, liquid, refreshing. How hardly it had won its way there Helen but guessed dimly, he alone knew. For day had succeeded day, and week week, and all day and all week he had wrestled blindly, hopelessly with the misery that Martin had brought on him, unable for all his efforts to find any possible justifying cause for what he had done, which seemed to him as wanton and as wicked as violent crime. To his Puritan mind, Martin’s reason,--namely, the craving for and the necessity of beauty and poetry in religion was as unintelligible as a page in an unknown language; not knowing at all what that craving meant, any more than he knew what homicidal mania meant to a maniac, he could not in any degree whatever feel or appreciate its force.