“Oh, thank you! But I am afraid it will be long before she is able to work again. It would be of no use to tell my mother, for somehow she seems to have taken a great dislike to poor Alice. I am positive she does not deserve it. My mother is the best woman I know, but she is very stiff when she takes to disliking someone. Have you got her address? Arthur would take money from me, I think, but I don’t know where he is.”

“I will see she has everything she needs,” answered Barbara.

“Bless your lovely heart, miss. But I fear nothing much will reach them as long as their mother is alive. She takes everything for herself. There’s Arthur, cold and thin and miserable, without even an overcoat in the bitterest weather! And Alice working so hard and so thin! And Mrs. Manson well dressed and eating the best money can buy. Such women as she have no right to be mothers! Why were they made—if people are made?”

“Perhaps they will be made something of,” suggested Barbara.

“If you are right, miss, and there be a God, either he’s not so good as you would be if you were God, or else somebody interferes, and won’t let him do his best.”

“Shall I tell you what our clergyman said to me the other day?” returned Barbara.

“Yes, I don’t mind what you say, because the God you would have me believe in is like yourself. And if such a God could be, I’m sure he would set everything right again as soon as he could.”

“Mr. Wingfold said that it was not fair, when a man had made something for a purpose, to say it was not good before we knew what his purpose with it was. ‘I don’t even like my wife to look at my poems before they’re finished,’ he said. ‘But God can’t hide away his work till it is finished, as I do my verses, and we ought to take care what we say about it. God wants to do something better with people than people think.’”

“Is he a poet?” asked Richard. “But when I think how he looked at the sunrise—he must be. That man doesn’t talk a bit like a clergyman. He talks just like any man. I couldn’t help liking him and wishing I might meet him again. But I think I could put a question or two to him yet that would puzzle him.”

“I don’t know,” returned Barbara. “But one thing I am sure of, that, if you did puzzle him, he would say he was puzzled and must have time to think it over.”

“That is honest. But do you think, miss, that you could get Arthur’s address from Alice? His office is not where it used to be.”

“I am sure I could.”