“Certainly not. But would you allow thought concerned in it? Would you allow that thought had preceded and occasioned its existence? Where a thing wakes thought and feeling, I say, must not thought be somewhere concerned in its origin?”

“Might not the thought and feeling come merely by associations, as in the case of the clock suggesting the flight of time?”

“I think our associations can hardly be so varied and delicate as to have a share in bringing to us half of the thoughts and feelings that nature wakes in us. There are deeper things, hidden both in our own beings, and in the depths of the origin of nature, which are responsible. I do not want to argue. I am only suggesting that, if the world moves thought and feeling in those that observe it, then thought and feeling are somehow concerned in the world. Feeling must have put itself into the shape that awakens feeling.—Ah, there is the sun! And there are things that ought never to be talked about in their presence! To talk of some things even behind their backs will keep them away!”

Richard neither understood his last words nor knew that he did not understand them. But he did understand that it was better to watch the sunrise than to talk of it.

Up came the child of heaven, conquering in the truth, in the might of essential being. Not argument, but the presence of God silenced the words of the young doubter. The two men stood lost in the swift changes of his attendant colours. Richard refused to let any emotion influence his opinions—they must be determined only by fact and logical outline. Whatever was not to him definite could not be believed. He had no notion, however, of all he did accept without questioning. Happily, the choice whether we shall be influenced is not given us. Happily, too, the choice whether we shall obey an influence is given us.

Without a word, Richard lifted his hat to the stranger and walked on, taking with him a germ of new feeling, which would enlarge and multiply without his knowing it. When he got to the next stile and was climbing it over the fence, he looked back and saw that the man was seated once again, but now reading.

After a while, Thomas Wingfold closed his book, put it back in his pocket, rose, and began his walk home. He crossed several fields and arrived just in time to meet his wife as she came down the stairs to breakfast.

“Have you had a nice walk, Thomas?” she asked.

“Indeed I have!” he answered. “I met a young fellow who, I think, will pluck his feet out of the mud before long.”

“Did you ask him for a visit?”

“No.”

“Shall I write and ask him?”