‘You should pray for faith.’

‘I don’t see how I can pray if I haven’t faith.’

’You’re too clever; but I would ask you, Alice—­you never told me—­did you never believe in God, I mean when you were a little child?’

’I suppose I must have, but, as well as I can remember, it was only in a very half-hearted way.  I could never quite bring myself to credit that there was a Being far away, sitting behind a cloud, who kept his eye on all the different worlds, and looked after them just as a stationmaster looks after the arrival and departure of trains from some great terminus.’

’Alice! how can you talk so?  Aren’t you afraid that something awful might happen to you for talking of the Creator of all things in that way?’

’Why should I be afraid, and why should that Being, if he exists, be angry with me for my sincerity?  If he be all-powerful, it rests with himself to make me believe.’

They had now accomplished the greater part of their journey, and, a little tired, had sat down to rest on a portion of a tree left by the woodcutters.  Gold rays slanted through the glades, enveloping and rounding off the tall smooth trunks that rose branchless to a height of thirty, even forty, feet; and the pink clouds, seen through the arching dome of green, were vague as the picture on some dim cathedral-roof.

‘In places like these, I wonder you don’t feel God’s presence.’

’On the contrary, the charm of nature is broken when we introduce a ruling official.’

‘Alice! how can you—­you who are so good—­speak in that way?’ At that moment a dead leaf rustled through the silence—­’And do you think that we shall die like that leaf?  That, like it, we shall become a part of the earth and be forgotten as utterly?’

’I am afraid I do.  That dead, fluttering thing was once a bud; it lived the summer-life of a leaf; now it will decay through the winter, and perhaps the next, until it finally becomes part of the earth.  Everything in nature I see pursuing the same course; why should I imagine myself an exception to the general rule?’

‘What, then, is the meaning of life?’

’That I’m afraid we shall never learn from listening to the rustling of leaves.’

The short sharp cry of a bird broke the mild calm of the woods, and Alice said: 

‘Perhaps the same thought that troubles us is troubling that bird.’

The girls walked on in silence, and when they came to the end of the path and their parting was inevitable, there was something of the passion of the lover in Cecilia’s voice:  ’Promise me you will come to see me soon again.  You’ll not leave me so long; you will write; I shall not be able to live if I don’t hear from you.’

The sound of hooves was heard, and a pair of cream-coloured ponies, with a florid woman driving determinedly, came sweeping round the corner.

‘What a strange person!’ said Alice, watching the blue veil and the brightly dyed hair.