was only made exclusively for what in his eyes was his own benefit. Tom could not understand Robert. His habits seemed steady, he drank little, he held somewhat aloof from the fast talk of the men whom yet he gathered about him— perhaps gaining weight with them by so doing. He made an outward profession of religion. But all his being was absorbed in one thought, that of 'getting on.' The scramble seemed but to grow fiercer, the nearer he got to the goal of fortune; but then, alas! fortune has no goal—it ever recedes, often only to vanish in thin air at last.

Tomsaid to Robert more than once,concerning his thoughts, his ways, and his friends, were these true, were those quite upright, were the friends worthy? Robert did not say much in selfdefence. He only persisted in the thoughts and the ways, made more friends of the same sort, and saw the less of Tom. Life is full of

such separations.

Olive marked her mother's rapidly ageing face. She noted that her mother spoke less than of old. She would sit in silence for hours now, and her loving manner towards her daughter changed to one of absolutely supplicating clinging. It seemed to Olive sometimes as if her mother was actually asking her pardon for still loving the son who showed so little love in return!

URING one of the conversations which
Robert and Tom had together, soon

after the return of the former from the North, young Sinclair said, rather suddenly, and apropos to nothing which had gone before,

Tom, do you know anything particular about your Mr. Sandison?'

Tom Ollison looked up at him, with a quick, puzzled glance. The question seemed to have a strangely familiar ring about it, as if he had heard it before, an experience which we have all of us known, and which has given rise to many elaborate theories concerning the action of the dual brain, and to more startling ones about pre-existence. Probably such experiences are generally to be attributed to nothing more than a sudden quickening, by some new combination of circumstance, of some old line of

thought and feeling, and our memory is not of the word or action which seems to stir it, but of a recurring mood of our own.

At least, Tom Ollison quickly realized that it was so in the present instance. A minute's reflection convinced him that what he really remembered was his own feeling of conjecture and bewilderment when Mr. Sandison himself had asked,

Tom, did your father ever tell you anything about me?'

And just as he had answered then, 'No, sir, except that he told me what great friends you had always been,' so he loyally answered

now,

'No, Robert-except that he is very much better than his words; and I have an idea that in this world that is very "particular," and, indeed, "peculiar"!'

'Ah,' said Robert, and shook his head, going on mysteriously, I suppose he does not like it spoken about. Perhaps some rebellion against his destiny accounts for his atheism.'

Tom did not ask what 'it' was. He always bitterly repented of having confided Grace's assertion to Robert. It was not so much that he yet doubted its truth, in the bald, materializ

tic sense of a fact. But since those early days he had himself been down into the depthsinto depths from which he felt he could never have risen but for a clinging, childlike faith that God was with him even there, and had hold of him even in the dark, and that God knew and believed in Tom Ollison, while Tom Ollison could not know or believe in God! And suppose Tom Ollison had been still in those depths, would God have grown tired of him and let him drop? Perish the idea! Then, too, in rising out of those depths, Tom had not scrambled back to the brink whence he had fallen; that would be no salvation from any Slough of Despond. God had brought him out, like the Psalmist of old, into 'a wealthy place,' upon the richer soil nearer the Celestial City. Tom could say his creed again, now, firmly and joyfully, feeling, indeed, that he had never believed it before; but then it did not mean to him quite the same which it had meant in days when he had thought he believed it, and would have argued stoutly in defence of its very words. (The alphabet is not the same to us, after we have learned to read, as it is when we are learning its letters.) To Tom, atheism was not now the frightful mystery which it is to those who seem to fear

that God's existence may be endangered if it should ever be denied by the majority of His children, who can only live and move and have their being in Him, as He in them. Tom now saw man as related to God, in the deepest part of his nature, as he is in his bodily existence to air and earth and fire and water; and he saw that by them man breathed and fed, and was warmed and refreshed, before he could articulate their names, and even if he was so blind or so idiotic that he could not see or comprehend them. Tom could recognise atheism and infidelity as the spiritual iconoclasts of the world, even as Judaism and Mahomedanism had been the breakers of its graven images,-and that they empty shrines of maimed or distorted ideas, to make way for the living form of the God-man. That memory of his own good father tenderly tending him through the foolish rage of his delirium had stood Tom in good stead again and again. God could never disown His children who did not love Him only because they did not know Him, or could not see His face. His other children could only love Him the more for such pain and such patience! And as for Peter Sandison, was there not perpetual prayer in those pathetic eyes of his ?—and for what