“Ah!” she said, and looked up into the wide sky and gazed as if she searched for the Somebody. “I should like to see the one that made that!” she said at last. “Think of knowing the very person that made that poor pigeon, and has got it now!—and made Miss Brown—and the wind! I must find him! He can’t have made me and not care when I ask him to speak to me! You say he is nowhere! I don’t believe there is any nowhere. A gift is nothing without what gives it! Oh, dear! I know what I mean, but I can’t say it!”

Richard said nothing in reply. He was not repelled by her enthusiasm, for there was nothing absurdly superstitious in it, only mildly misinformed. She could not help what she had been taught.

They went walking toward the house and were silent. The moon went on with her silentness—she never stops being silent. When they felt near the house, they fell to walking slower, but neither knew it. Barbara spoke again.

“Just imagine,” she said, “if God were all the time at our backs, giving us one lovely thing after another, trying to make us look around and see who it was that was so good to us! Imagine him standing there wondering when his little one would look round and see him. If only I had him to love! Just think of all the shapes and lights and shadows and colours, and the moon and the wind and the water, all the creatures and the people—”

“And all the pain and the dying and the disease and the wrongs and the cruelty!” interposed Richard.

She was silent. After a moment or two she said, “I think I will go in now. I feel rather cold. I think there must be a fog, though I can’t see it.” She gave a little shiver.

He looked in her face. Was it the moon, or was it something in her thoughts that had suddenly made the sweet countenance turn gray? Could his mere suggestion of the reverse, the wrong side of the web of creation, have done it?

“I think I want someone to say must to me,” she said, after another pause. “I feel as if—”

There she stopped. Richard said nothing. Barbara went on a few steps, then turned and said—

“Are you going in?”

“Not just yet,” he answered. “Please remember that if I can do anything for you—”

“You are very kind. I am much obliged to you. Perhaps sometime another poem—”

“It will be hard to find another so good,” returned Richard.

“Good night,” she said.

“Good night, miss,” answered Richard, and walked away with loss in his heart. The poem had already ceased to please her. He had made the lovely lady more thoughtful, if less happy than before.