Katharine looked up at him with a little, half-childish glance of wonder.
“Why, uncle Robert,” she said, “I always thought you were a religious man—like papa, you know.”
“No.” The old man smiled faintly. “I’m not like your father. I fancy I’m more like you—in some ways. Aren’t you religious, as you call it, my dear?”
“I’m religious, as I call it—but not as ‘they’ call it.” She laughed a little, perhaps at herself. “I seem to see something, and I believe in it, without quite seeing it. Oh, I can’t explain! I’ve tried so often, but it’s quite hopeless.”
“Try again,” said old Lauderdale. “It can’t do any harm, and it may do me good. I’m so lonely.”
Katharine was perhaps too young to understand that loneliness, but the look in the sunken blue eyes touched her. She rose and bent over him, and kissed the pale, wrinkled forehead twice.
“It’s our fault—the fault of all us,” she said, sinking into her seat again.
“No; it’s not,” he answered. “I didn’t want you all, and I couldn’t have the ones I wanted. It doesn’t matter now. I want to hear you talk. Try and tell me what you think it all means, from your end of life. I’ve forgotten—it’s so long ago.”
He sighed, then coughed, raising himself a little, and then sank back upon his pillow and closed his eyes, as though to listen.
“People say so many things,” Katharine began. “Perhaps that’s the trouble. One hears so much that disturbs one’s belief, and one hears nothing that settles it in any new way. That’s what happens to every one. In trying to find reasons for things, people ruin the things themselves with the tools they use. You can’t find out the reason of a flower—certainly not by sticking the point of a steel knife into it and cutting the heart out. You can see how it’s made—that’s science. But the reason of its being a flower has nothing to do with science. If it had, science would find it out, because science can do anything possible in its own line. But it’s always the steel knife—always, always. You can’t tell why things exist, by taking them to pieces, can you?”