Mr. Voltelen was a poor student, and I quite understood from the
conversation of my elders what a pleasure and advantage it was to him to
get a cup of coffee extra and fine white bread and fresh butter with it
every day. On the stroke of half-past ten the maid brought it in on a
tray. Lessons were stopped, and the tutor ate and drank with a relish
that I had never seen anyone show over eating and drinking before. The
very way in which he took his sugar--more sugar than Father or Mother
took--and dissolved it in the coffee before he poured in the cream,
showed what a treat the cup of coffee was to him.

Mr. Voltelen had a delicate chest, and sometimes the grown-up people
said they were afraid he could not live. There was a report that a rich
benefactor, named Nobel, had offered to send him to Italy, that he might
recover in the warmer climate of the South. It was generous of Mr.
Nobel, and Mr. Voltelen was thinking of starting. Then he caught another
complaint. He had beautiful, brown, curly hair. One day he stayed away;
he had a bad head, he had contracted a disease in his hair from a dirty
comb at a bathing establishment. And when he came again I hardly
recognised him. He wore a little dark wig. He had lost every hair on his
head, even his eyebrows had disappeared. His face was of a chalky
pallor, and he coughed badly too.

Why did not God protect him from consumption? And how could God find it
in His heart to give him the hair disease when he was so ill already?
God was strange. He was Almighty, but He did not use His might to take
care of Mr. Voltelen, who was so good and so clever, and so poor that he
needed help more than anyone else. Mr. Nobel was kinder to Mr. Voltelen
than God was. God was strange, too, in other ways; He was present
everywhere, and yet Mother was cross and angry if you asked whether He
was in the new moderator lamp, which burnt in the drawing-room with a