prodigal haunts the dens of evil and waste. Cry to him, Leopold, my
dear boy. Cry to him again and yet again, for he himself said that
men ought always to pray and not faint, for God did hear and would
answer although he might seem long about it. I think we shall find
one day that nobody, not the poet of widest sweep and most daring
imagination, not the prophet who soars the highest in his ardour to
justify the ways of God to men, not the child when he is most fully
possessed of the angel that in heaven always beholds the face of the
Father of Jesus, has come or could have come within sight of the
majesty of his bestowing upon his children. For did he not, if the
story be true, allow torture itself to invade the very soul's
citadel of his best beloved, as he went to seek the poor ape of a
prodigal, stupidly grinning amongst his harlots?"

Leopold did not answer, and the shadow lay deep on his face for a
while; but at length it began to thin, and at last a feeble
quivering smile broke through the cloud, and he wept soft tears of
refreshing.

It was not that the youth had turned again from the hope of rest in
the Son of Man; but that, as everyone knows who knows anything of
the human spirit, there must be in its history days and seasons,
mornings and nights, yea deepest midnights. It has its alternating
summer and winter, its storm and shine, its soft dews and its
tempests of lashing hail, its cold moons and prophetic stars, its
pale twilights of saddest memory, and its golden gleams of brightest
hope. All these mingled and displaced each other in Leopold's ruined
world, where chaos had come again, but over whose waters a mightier
breath was now moving.