Not that she had any belief in anything. Far from it. Why she so often thought of Christ and His doctrine she could not tell. “I don’t believe in Him, and I never get any good from praying to Him. If He is all love and all-powerful, why doesn’t He give me back my old faith?” But every time she knelt down to pray the old feeling of suffocation and blackness returned. At last she began to think of Christ as a man. “If I forget that He is a God I shall catch hold of Him better.” And no sooner had she done this than she was struck by the extreme marvellous beauty of His character. “I’ll cling on to Christ, though I don’t understand Him very well,” she thought. But if you follow Christ He will lead you by the most terrible uphill undiscovered paths that ever you trod in your life, and if you try to follow Him blindly, without any clear guiding light showing the way upward, you are of all creatures on earth most miserable. So because she thought that Christ would have approved she would often light the school fire and sweep up the hearth. There were more people, doubtless, who approved of this besides Christ, the woman who cleaned the school being prominent among the number. The clergyman in the parish was very fond of Deborah. It was only natural, because she managed the school very well and kept the children in order. He was a very interesting study, though he was old, and at times he could be very charming. There was, however, one gentleman there whom Deborah much liked. He was the father of a boy whom she went to teach every night. He was always kind to her, and always polite whenever she might meet him, and never condescending. And she was very thankful. “If it were not for this gentleman,” she used to think at times, “I should get to fancying there was something wrong with me, I get so many snubs which seem to me uncalled for.” So she felt a certain respect for him: unobtrusive kindness always excited that feeling in her, as perhaps it does in most of us. At last the snubs ceased to have any effect; when one is subjected to a great deal of that kind of thing it generally happens that way. For some months before she left the people had become nonentities to her; she was taken up with things which were far more a case of life and death to her than they could ever be. CHAPTER XVI