“Rather, I must confess! I don’t believe it can be a good thing at your age to think so much about religion. There is a time for everything. You talk like one of those good little children in books that always die--at least I have heard of such books--I never saw any of them.” Cosmo laughed again. “Which of us is the merrier--you or me? Which of us is the stronger, Joan? The moment I saw you, I thought you looked like one that hadn’t enough of something--as if you weren’t happy; but if you knew that the great beautiful person we call God, was always near you, it would be impossible for you to go on being sad.” Joan gave a great sigh: her heart knew its own bitterness, and there was little joy in it for a stranger to intermeddle with. But she said to herself the boy would be a gray-haired man before he was twenty, and began to imagine a mission to help him out of these morbid fancies. “You must surely understand, Cosmo,” she said, “that, while we are in this world, we must live as people of this world, not of another.” “But you can’t mean that the people of this world are banished from Him who put them in it! He is all the same, in this world and in every other. If anything makes us happy, it must make us much happier to know it for a bit of frozen love--for the love that gives is to the gift as water is to snow. Ah, you should hear our torrent sing in summer, and shout in the spring! The thought of God fills me so full of life that I want to go and do something for everybody. I am never miserable. I don’t think I shall be when my father dies.” “Oh, Cosmo!--with such a good father as yours! I am shocked.” Her words struck a pang into her own heart, for she felt as if she had compared his father and hers, over whom she was not miserable. Cosmo turned, and looked at her. The sun was close upon the horizon, and his level rays shone full on the face of the boy. “Lady Joan,” he said slowly, and with a tremble in his voice, “I should just laugh with delight to have to die for my father. But if he were taken from me now, I should be so proud of him, I should have no room to be miserable. As God makes me glad though I cannot see him, so my father would make me glad though I could not see him. I cannot see him now, and yet I am glad because my father _is_--away down there in the old castle; and when he is gone from me, I shall be glad still, for he will be _somewhere_ all the same--with God, as he is now. We shall meet again one day, and run at each other.” It was an odd phrase with which he ended, but Lady Joan did not laugh.