“You are a good girl, Dawtie, and I approve of every word you say. It would more than savor of presumption to profess that I loved God up to the point you speak of; but I deserve to love Him. Doubtless a man ought to love God so, and we are all sinners just because we do not love God so. But we have the atonement!” “But, sir,” answered Dawtie, the silent tears running down her face, “I love God that way! I don't care a dust for anything without Him! When I go to bed, I don't care if I never wake again in this world; I shall be where He would have me!” “You presume, Dawtie! I fear me much you presume! What if that should be in hell?” “If it be, it will be the best. It will be to set me right. Oh, sir, He is so good! Tell me one thing, sir: when you die--” “Tut, tut, lass! we're not come to that yet! There's no occasion to think about that yet awhile! We're in the hands of a reconciled God.” “What I want to know,” pursued Dawtie, “is how you will feel, how you will get on when you haven't got anything!” “Not got anything, girl! Are you losing your senses? Of course we shall want nothing then! I shall have to talk to the doctor about you! We shall have you killing us in our beds to know how we like it!” He laughed; but it was a rather scared laugh. “What I mean,” she persisted, “is--when you have no body, and no hands to take hold of your cap, what will you do without it?” “What if I leave it to you, Dawtie!” returned the laird, with a stupid mixture of joke and avarice in his cold eye. “Please, sir, I didn't say what you would do with it, but what would you do without it when it will neither come out of your heart nor into your hands! It must be misery to a miser to _have_ nothing!” “A miser, hussy!” “A lover of things, more than a lover of God!” “Well, perhaps you have the better of me!” he said, after a cowed pause; for he perceived there was no compromise possible with Dawtie: she knew perfectly what she meant; and he could neither escape her logic, nor change her determination, whatever that might be. “I dare say you are right! I will think what ought to be done about that cup!” He stopped, self amazed: he had committed himself!--as much as confessed the cup genuine! But Dawtie had not been deceived, and had not been thinking about the cup. Only it was plain that, if he would consent to part with it for its money-worth, that would be a grand beginning toward the renouncing of dead _things_ altogether, toward the turning to the living One the love that now gathered, clinging and haunting, about gold cups and graved armor, and suchlike vapors and vanishings, that pass with the sunsets and the snows. She fell on her knees, and, in the spirit of a child and of the apostle of the Gentiles, cried, laying her little red hands together and uplifting them to her master in purest entreaty.