“How do you mean?”

“She has a process to go through, and she will come out ever so much the better.”

“You’re not going to have an operation performed on her—at her age?”

“No. She is going to have her body stripped off.”

“Good gracious!” cried Barbara. Then, seeing finally what he meant, she began laughing heartily.

“So then,” she said, “you believe animals have souls? I have always thought so.”

“So have I, and so I do indeed!” answered Wingfold. “I can’t prove it. I can’t prove anything—to my own satisfaction, that is, though I dare say I might to the satisfaction of one who did not love the creatures enough to be anxious about them. I don’t think you can prove anything that is worth being anxious about.”

“Then why do you believe it?” asked Barbara, influenced by the talk of the century.

“Because I can,” answered Wingfold. “To believe and to be able to prove, have little or nothing to do with each other. To believe and to convince have much to do with each other.”

“But,” persisted Barbara, with Richard in her mind, “how are you to be sure of a thing you can’t prove?”

“That’s a good question, and this is my answer,” said Wingfold:—“What you love, you already believe enough to put it to the proof of trial. My life is such a proving, and the proof is so promising that it fills me with the happiest hope. To prove with your brains the thing you love, would be to deck the garments of salvation with a useless fringe. Shall I search heaven and earth for proof that my wife is a good and lovely woman? The signs of it are everywhere—the proofs of it nowhere.”

They walked along for a while, side by side, in silence. Which had changed direction to walk with the other, neither knew. Barbara was beginning already to feel that safety which almost everybody sooner or later came to feel in Wingfold’s company. That safety was born in the sense that, in the closest talk about the deepest things, he never lay in wait for a verbal victory. He took his companion as equal to himself.

“Then,” said Barbara at length, still thinking of Richard, “if you believe that even the beasts are saved, you must think it very bad of a man not to believe in a God!”

“I should think anyhow that he didn’t care much about the beasts it he hadn’t a heart big enough to take the beasts in!”

“But he couldn’t, you know, if he didn’t believe in God!”

“I understand. But if he loved the poor beasts very much and thought what a time of suffering they have in the world, I don’t know how he could help hoping at least, that there was a God somewhere who would somehow make up to them for it all.”