’What do you do then,’ said Hermie, ’when you are miserable in bed?’
Miss Browne thought a second. ’I think I say my prayers,’ she said.
’I—I think I go to sleep then; one is generally tired.’ She spoke apologetically.
Hermie leaned her head still farther back. ’Saying prayers would not help me much,’ she said. ’I am an atheist.’
’An atheist,’ said Hermie. ’It is very comfortable to be one. You have only to think about eating and sleeping. Oh dear!’
She arose languidly and administered water to Miss Browne, who was gasping alarmingly. ’This room is hot,’ she said. ’Go and lie down in your own. You shouldn’t have made me talk, if you didn’t want to hear things. Mind that bit of loose wood at the door.’
Miss Browne, thus dismissed, went away like a chidden child, but her eyes were full of terror, and her very knees trembled. She groped her way to the sitting-room and poured out the frightful story into Mr. Cameron’s ears.
He made his own way presently to the hot, cramped bedroom. Hermie had let her hair down, and was sitting on the edge of the bed surveying her poor little prettinesses tragically in the looking-glass.
Her father sat down on the bed beside her, and disclaimed fatigue and headache and everything else she urged upon him.
’What is this Miss Browne tells me, little one?’ he said, and almost indulgently, so young, slight, and absurd she looked, to be questioning eternity.
Hermie twisted her wavy hair up into a hard plain knot.
’I only said I was an atheist,’ she said, and her young lips quivered and her eyes grew wild.
’How long have you been feeling like this, childie?’
She burst into a passion of frightened tears.
She swallowed a few sobs. ’I’m tired of saying prayers, nothing gets better—nothing comes. It—it’s easy enough to believe in God, if you live in Sydney and have water laid on—and cool days and money and a mother. But out here—oh, He can’t expect us to believe in Him!’
’Us!’ she repeated. ’You don’t believe anything, do you, father? I’ve never heard you say a word. I have thought for long enough you were an atheist too.’
He took his arm away and moved to the little window; it was almost ten minutes before he turned round and came back to her.
’Child,’ he said, ’sometimes I think my mistakes are too many for me. I have nothing to say to you. I dare not even say, Forgive me. Poor little child, to have come to such rocks! I should have helped you long ago. Only, you see, I had got in the habit of leaving these things to mother.’