“If I only could!” she sighed; “but I won’t pray, Fred; I can’t, to a God of punishment.”
He did not reply, except by a kiss, but, when the door had closed behind her, smiled a little bitterly.
“The mystery of pain,” he thought, “she said we should solve it together, hoping all the while to convert me, as I knew very well. And her solution is, a God of punishment!”
He turned up his reading-lamp and took up the latest medical treatise, which, though it recommended very harsh remedies, he did not decline to believe in.
Dr. Richards was a devotee of physical science, not a philologist, and it therefore did not occur to him that, etymologically, Punishment is much the same word as Purification.
CHAPTER XII.
“O YE ICE AND SNOW, BLESS YE THE LORD!”
Louis was awake bright and early on that Christmas morning, though, as applied to the atmospheric conditions of that particular day, “bright” is a singularly inappropriate adjective. The snow fell, not merely in flakes, but in clouds, and whether “the opposite side of the street” was “over the way,” or in Farther India, was purely a matter of faith; to the eye it was perfectly invisible.
“I don’t see how you are to get even as far as next door with those things,” said Metzerott, half in earnest, looking first at Louis, then at the blinding storm.
“Oh! but, papa, I must take George and Frau Anna their presents,” cried Louis in dismay.
“I don’t see why you must,” said his father. “Fritz will be in after his breakfast in a few minutes; he can take them.”