"But suppose you saw somebody being ill-treated, some poor dog or cat being teased, wouldn't you feel inclined to cry?"
"Oh, no," Mark declared. "I get quite red inside of me, and I want to kick the people who is doing it."
"Well, now you can understand why God sometimes gets angry. But even if He gets angry," Mrs. Lidderdale went on, for she was rather afraid of her son's capacity for logic, "God never lets His anger get the better of Him. He is not only sorry for the poor dog, but He is also sorry for the poor person who is ill-treating the dog. He knows that the poor person has perhaps never been taught better, and then the Eye fills with tears again."
"I think I like Jesus better than God," said Mark, going off at a tangent. He felt that there were too many points of resemblance between his own father and God to make it prudent to persevere with the discussion. On the subject of his father he always found his mother strangely uncomprehending, and the only times she was really angry with him was when he refused out of his basic honesty to admit that he loved his father.
"But Our Lord _is_ God," Mrs. Lidderdale protested.
Mark wrinkled his face in an effort to confront once more this eternal puzzle.
"Don't you remember, darling, three Persons and one God?"
"You haven't forgotten that clover-leaf we picked one day in Kensington Gardens?"
"When we fed the ducks on the Round Pond?"
"Yes, darling, but don't think about ducks just now. I want you to think about the Holy Trinity."
"But I can't understand the Holy Trinity, Mother," he protested.
"Nobody can understand the Holy Trinity. It is a great mystery."
"Mystery," echoed Mark, taking pleasure in the word. It always thrilled him, that word, ever since he first heard it used by Dora the servant when she could not find her rolling-pin.
"Well, where that rolling-pin's got to is a mystery," she had declared.
Then he had seen the word in print. The Coram Street Mystery. All about a dead body. He had pronounced it "micetery" at first, until he had been corrected and was able to identify the word as the one used by Dora about her rolling-pin. History stood for the hard dull fact, and mystery stood for all that history was not. There were no dates in "mystery:" Mark even at seven years, such was the fate of intelligent precocity, had already had to grapple with a few conspicuous dates in the immense tale of humanity. He knew for instance that William the Conqueror landed in 1066, and that St. Augustine landed in 596, and that Julius Cæsar landed, but he could never remember exactly when. The last time he was asked that date, he had countered with a request to know when Noah had landed.