Juliet made no answer—­Dorothy could not tell whether from feeling or from indifference.  The fact was, the words conveyed no more meaning to Juliet than they will to some of my readers.  Why do I write them then?  Because there are some who will understand them at once, and others who will grow to understand them.  Dorothy was astonished to find herself saying them.  The demands of her new office of comforter gave shape to many half-formed thoughts, substance to many shadowy perceptions, something like music to not a few dim feelings moving within her; but what she said hardly seemed her own at all.

Had it not been for Wingfold’s help, Dorothy might not have learned these things in this world; but had it not been for Juliet, they would have taken years more to blossom in her being, and so become her own.  Her faint hope seemed now to break forth suddenly into power.  Whether or not she was saying such things as were within the scope of Juliet’s apprehension, was a matter of comparatively little moment.  As she lay there in misery, rocking herself from side to side on the floor, she would have taken hold of nothing.  But love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak, the love will be felt where the truth is never perceived.  Love indeed is the highest in all truth; and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save sometimes than the wisest argument, even rightly understood.  Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power; and where love seems to fail it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays.

Dorothy thought of another line of expostulation.

“Juliet,” she said, “suppose you were to drown yourself and your husband were to repent?”

“That is the only hope left me.  You see yourself I have no choice.”

“You have no pity, it seems; for what then would become of him?  What if he should come to himself in bitter sorrow, in wild longing for your forgiveness, but you had taken your forgiveness with you, where he had no hope of ever finding it?  Do you want to punish him? to make him as miserable as yourself? to add immeasurably to the wrong you have done him, by going where no word, no message, no letter can pass, no cry can cross?  No, Juliet—­death can set nothing right.  But if there be a God, then nothing can go wrong but He can set it right, and set it right better than it was before.”

“He could not make it better than it was.”

“What!—­is that your ideal of love—­a love that fails in the first trial?  If He could not better that, then indeed He were no God worth the name.”

“Why then did He make us such—­make such a world as is always going wrong?”