For a time neither said any thing more.  The silent tears were streaming from Dorothy’s eyes.  At length she spoke.

“I wonder if I could tell you what it is without hurting you, father!” she said.

“I can hear any thing from you, my child,” he answered.  “Then I will try.  But I do not think I shall ever quite know my father on earth, or be quite able to open my heart to him, until I have found my Father in Heaven.”

“Ah, my child! is it so with you?  Do you fear you have not yet given yourself to the Saviour?  Give yourself now.  His arms are ever open to receive you.”

“That is hardly the point, father.—­Will you let me ask you any question I please?”

“Assuredly, my child.”  He always spoke, though quite unconsciously, with a little of the ex-cathedral tone.

“Then tell me, father, are you just as sure of God as you are of me standing here before you?”

She had stopped and turned, and stood looking him full in the face with wide, troubled eyes.

Mr. Drake was silent.  Hateful is the professional, contemptible is the love of display, but in his case they floated only as vapors in the air of a genuine soul.  He was a true man, and as he could not say yes, neither would he hide his no in a multitude of words—­at least to his own daughter:  he was not so sure of God as he was of that daughter, with those eyes looking straight into his!  Could it be that he never had believed in God at all?  The thought went through him with a great pang.  It was as if the moon grew dark above him, and the earth withered under his feet.  He stood before his child like one whose hypocrisy had been proclaimed from the housetop.

“Are you vexed with me, father?” said Dorothy sadly.

“No, my child,” answered the minister, in a voice of unnatural composure.  “But you stand before me there like, the very thought started out of my soul, alive and visible, to question its own origin.”

“Ah, father!” cried Dorothy, “let us question our origin.”

The minister never even heard the words.

“That very doubt, embodied there in my child, has, I now know, been haunting me, dogging me behind, ever since I began to teach others,” he said, as if talking in his sleep.  “Now it looks me in the face.  Am I myself to be a castaway?—­Dorothy, I am not sure of God—­not as I am sure of you, my darling.”

He stood silent.  His ear expected a low-voiced, sorrowful reply.  He started at the tone of gladness in which Dorothy cried—­

“Then, father, there is henceforth no cloud between us, for we are in the same cloud together!  It does not divide us, it only brings us closer to each other.  Help me, father:  I am trying hard to find God.  At the same time, I confess I would rather not find Him, than find Him such as I have sometimes heard you represent Him.”

“It may well be,” returned her father—­the ex-cathedral, the professional tone had vanished utterly for the time, and he spoke with the voice of an humble, true man—­“it may well be that I have done Him wrong; for since now at my age I am compelled to allow that I am not sure of Him, what more likely than that I may have been cherishing wrong ideas concerning Him, and so not looking in the right direction for finding Him?”