"Oh! but I have—often," murmured Nelly, again looking down.
"When? I am certain that you never swear."
"When I pray," answered Nelly, speaking very low, so that Walter could scarcely catch the words.
"Surely, if you are ever out of harm's way, it's when you are praying," exclaimed Walter.
"Not if I am thinking of something else all the time. Father has told me that we may say prayers and yet never pray, and that this is taking the Lord's name in vain."
Walter sighed; for the first time he felt how difficult it must be to attain to that "holiness without which no man shall see the Lord." After the wild life that he had led, the wicked scenes that he had witnessed, Viner's dwelling seemed to him the home of purity itself; and Nelly, a little cherub all spotless and holy, who never had known anything of sin.
It was with a feeling to which he had been a stranger before, a sense of weakness, a consciousness of guilt, that he knelt that evening by the little child's side, and repeated after her father the words of the Lord's Prayer:
"HALLOWED BE THY NAME."
