"Very unsafe, Miss Faith, to build up such a superstructure upon grounds that you neither see nor know. I was immediately beginning to question the style of my own explanations this morning."
"Why, sir?"
"If I seem tired, said explanations may have seemed—tiresome."
She looked silently, with a smile, as if questioning the possibility of his thinking so; and her answer did not go to that point.
"You didn't seem tired, Mr. Linden—I had no reason for thinking so, I suppose. I was only afraid. I was going to ask you what Dr. Harrison meant last night by the angel riding upon a sunbeam? I saw you knew what he meant."
Mr. Linden got up and went for a book—then came back to his couch again.
"Precisely what Dr. Harrison meant, Miss Faith, I should not like to say. What he referred to, was a part of Paradise Lost, where the angels set to guard the earth have a messenger.
'Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even
On a sunbeam, swift as a shooting star.'"
"Who is Uriel? an angel?"
"Yes. He is called,