Something from the outside had come, he knew not what nor how, to tarnish the fair gold of her certainty.

She had not said so, but he divined it when he shrewdly observed that she was seeking to comfort him, to support his own faith when day after day the Son of Man came not.
"It will surely be in another month, Daddy--perhaps next week--perhaps to-morrow," she would say cheerfully.

"And you did right not to put in any crops.

It would have been wicked to doubt." He quickly detected her insincerity, seeing that she did not at all believe.

As the summer came and went without a sign from the heavens, she became more positive and more constant in these assurances.