find his hands both hard and heavy."

"How do you stand this trying spring weather, Mr. Drake? I don't hear
the best accounts of you," said the surgeon, drawing Ruber a pace back
from the door.

"I am as well as at my age I can perhaps expect to be," answered the
minister. "I am getting old--and--and--we all have our troubles, and, I
trust, our God also, to set them right for us," he added, with a
suggesting look in the face of the doctor.

"By Jove!" said Faber to himself, "the spring weather has roused the
worshiping instinct! The clergy are awake to-day! I had better look out,
or it will soon be too hot for me."

"I can't look you in the face, doctor," resumed the old man after a
pause, "and believe what people say of you. It can't be that you don't
even believe there _is_ a God?"

Faber would rather have said nothing; but his integrity he must keep
fast hold of, or perish in his own esteem.

"If there be one," he replied, "I only state a fact when I say He has
never given me ground sufficient to think so. You say yourselves He has
favorites to whom He reveals Himself: I am not one of them, and must
therefore of necessity be an unbeliever."

"But think, Mr. Faber--if there should be a God, what an insult it is to
deny Him existence."