"Yes, but all the meanness, the ugliness, and the sorrow that our Father permits! First, He launches us into the world, helpless and ignorant, without telling us anything. And then, when we do wrong because we know no better, we are punished, Is that fatherly?" But Marjon said: "Did you fancy it was not? Kees gets punished, too, so he will learn. And now that he is clever and well taught he gets hardly any blows--only tid-bits. Isn't that so, Kees?" "But, Marjon, did you not tell me how you found Kees--shy, thin, and mangy--his coat all spoiled with hunger and beatings; and how he has remained timid ever since, because a couple of rascally boys had mistreated him?" Marjon nodded, and said: "There are rascals, and deucedly wicked boys, and very likely there is a Devil, also; but I am my Father's child and not afraid of Him, nor what He may do with me." "But if He makes you ill, and lets you be ill-treated? If He lets you do wrong, and then leaves you to cry about it? And if He makes you foolish?" Keesje was coming down from the mast, very softly and deliberately. With his black, dirty little hands he cautiously and hesitatingly touched the boy's clothes that Marjon was wearing. He wanted to go to sleep, and had been used to a soft lap. But his mistress took him up, and hid him in her jacket. Then he yawned contentedly, like a little old man, and closed his pale eyelids in sleep--his little face looking very pious with its eyebrows raised in a saintly arch. Marjon said: "If I should go and ill-treat Keesje, he would make a great fuss about it, but still he would stay with me." "Yes; but he would do the same with a common tramp," said Johannes. Marjon shook her head, doubtfully. "Kees is rather stupid--much more so than you or I, but yet not altogether stupid. He well knows who means to treat him rightly. He knows well that I do not ill-treat him for my own pleasure. And you see, Jo, I know certainly, _ever_ so certainly--that my Father will not ill-treat me without a reason." Johannes pressed her hand, and asked passionately: "How do you know that? How do you know?" Marjon smiled, and gave him a gentle look. "Exactly as I know you to be a good boy--one who does not lie. I can tell that about you in various ways I could not explain--by one thing and another. So, too, I can see that my Father means well by me. By the flowers, the clouds, the sparkling water. Sometimes it makes me cry--it is so plain." Then Johannes remembered how he had once been taught to pray, and his troubled thoughts grew calmer. Yet he could not refrain from asking--because he had been so much with Pluizer: "Why might not that be a cheat?" Suddenly Keesje waked up and looked behind him at Johannes, in a frightened way.