dull at the rectory without her." Thus he comforted himself for what was
only a disappointment to his vanity, and was quite cheerful when he
opened Helen's letter.

The post-office was in that part of the drug-store where the herbs were
kept, and the letters always had a faint smell of pennyroyal or wormwood
about them. The rector read his letter, leaning against the counter,
and crumpling some bay leaves between his fingers; and though he was
interrupted half a dozen times by people coming for their mail, and
stopping to gossip about the weather or the church, he gained a very
uncomfortable sense of its contents.

"More of this talk about belief," he grumbled, as he folded the last
sheet, covered with the clear heavy writing, and struck it impatiently
across his hand before he thrust it down into his pocket. "What in the
world is John Ward thinking of to let her bother her head with such
questions?"

"I am surprised" Helen wrote, "to see how narrowness and intolerance seem
to belong to intense belief. Some of these elders in John's church,
especially a man called Dean (the father of my Alfaretta), believe in
their horrible doctrines with all their hearts, and their absolute
conviction make them blind to any possibility of good in any creed which
does not agree with theirs. Apparently, they think they have reached the
ultimate truth, and never even look for new light. That is the strangest
thing to me. Now, for my part, I would not sign a creed to-day which I
had written myself, because one lives progressively in religion as in
everything else. But, after all, as I said to Gifford the other day, the
_form_ of belief is of so little consequence. The main thing is to have
the realization of God in one's own soul; it would be enough to have