present no shadow of compensation beyond the satisfaction of not being deceived.  It remains a question, however, which there was no one to put to Faber—­whether he had not some amends in relief from the notion, vaguely it may be, yet unpleasantly haunting many minds—­of a Supreme Being—­a Deity—­putting forth claims to obedience—­an uncomfortable sort of phantom, however imaginary, for one to have brooding above him, and continually coming between him and the freedom of an else empty universe.  To the human soul as I have learned to know it, an empty universe would be as an exhausted receiver to the lungs that thirst for air; but Faber liked the idea:  how he would have liked the reality remains another thing.  I suspect that what we call damnation is something as near it as it can be made; itself it can not be, for even the damned must live by God’s life.  Was it, I repeat, no compensation for his martyrdom to his precious truth, to know that to none had he to render an account?  Was he relieved from no misty sense of a moral consciousness judging his, and ready to enforce its rebuke—­a belief which seems to me to involve the highest idea, the noblest pledge, the richest promise of our nature?  There may be men in whose turning from implicit to explicit denial, no such element of relief is concerned—­I can not tell; but although the structure of Paul Faber’s life had in it material of noble sort, I doubt if he was one of such.

The summer at length reigned lordly in the land.  The roses were in bloom, from the black purple to the warm white.  Ah, those roses!  He must indeed be a God who invented the roses.  They sank into the red hearts of men and women, caused old men to sigh, young men to long, and women to weep with strange ecstatic sadness.  But their scent made Faber lonely and poor, for the rose-heart would not open its leaves to him.

The winds were soft and odor-laden.  The wide meadows through which flowed the river, seemed to smite the eye with their greenness; and the black and red and white kine bent down their sleek necks among the marsh-marigolds and the meadow-sweet and the hundred lovely things that border the level water-courses, and fed on the blessed grass.  Along the banks, here with nets, there with rod and line, they caught the gleaming salmon, and his silver armor flashed useless in the sun.  The old pastor sat much in his little summer-house, and paced his green walk on the border of the Lythe; but in all the gold of the sunlight, in all the glow and the plenty around him, his heart was oppressed with the sense of his poverty.  It was not that he could not do the thing he would, but that he could not meet and rectify the thing he had done.  He could behave, he said to himself, neither as a gentleman nor a Christian, for lack of money; and, worst of all, he could not get rid of a sense of wrong—­of rebellious heavings of heart, of resentments, of doubts that came thick upon him—­not of the existence of God, nor of His goodness towards men in general, but of His kindness to himself.  Logically, no doubt, they were all bound in one, and the being that could be unfair to a beetle could not be God, could not make a beetle; but our feelings, especially where a wretched self is concerned, are notably illogical.