us, and give us repentance and humility and love and faith, that we
may indeed be the children of thy Father who is in heaven. Amen."

While Polwarth was yet praying, the door had opened gently behind
him, and Helen, not knowing that he was there, had entered with
Bascombe. He neither heard their entrance, nor saw the face of
disgust that George made behind his back. What was in Bascombe's
deepest soul who shall tell? Of that region he himself knew nothing.
It was a silent, holy place into which he had never yet entered--
therefore lonely and deserted as the top of Sinai after the cloud
had departed. No--I will not say that: who knows what is where man
cannot or will not look? If George had sought there, perhaps he
might have found traces of a presence not yet altogether vanished.
In what he called and imagined his deeepest soul, however, all he
was now conscious of was a perfect loathing of the monstrous
superstition so fitly embodied before him. The prayer of the
kneeling absurdity was to him an audacious mockery of the
infrangible laws of Nature: this hulk of misshapen pottery actually
presuming to believe that an invisible individual heard what he said
because he crooked his hinges to say it! It did not occur to George
that the infrangible laws of Nature she had herself from the very
first so agonizingly broken to the poor dwarf, she had been to him
such a cruel step-mother, that he was in evil case indeed if he
could find no father to give him fair play and a chance of the
endurable. Was he so much to blame if he felt the annihilation
offered by such theorists as George, not altogether a satisfactory
counterpoise either to its existence or its loss? If, even, he were
to fancy in his trouble that the old fable of an elder brother,
something more humble than grand handsome George Bascombe and more
ready to help his little brothers and sisters, might be true, seeing