Her first thought about this was that it was deliberately bad, as bad as his smoking and his score of other boy tricks. It was blasphemous and wildly untrue. She sent him away in disgrace, much discomfited and hurt. Probably this rudeness of her own was what brought her so swiftly around to forgiveness, or it may be that she came to look kindly on his tribute. In any event, she gave Bennet a note for him, a queer, misspelled, dignified note.... When Potter returned she told him that he “must not think of Jesus as a person but as God, and that was the end of it.” II The next Spring, which followed on the heels of his fourteenth birthday, held a wonder for Potter Osprey such as he had not experienced before. Until now the green buds and soft winds had meant a time for the surreptitious stripping off of shoes and stockings after school (and out of sight of home), the agonizing anticipation of three long months of holidaying, and the making of limitless plans for outdoor fun. This year he welcomed the bright weeks not as a rowdy boy, but with a conscious relish that came from a deeper source within him. The Spring itself, as if it also were filled with a sense of unusual importance, was precocious. When Potter, late every afternoon, ambled along the several blocks of blatantly new sidewalks that led to the church, the grass hid the softened brown earth with an abundance of delicate colour wherever feet had not trod, the robins and squirrels skipped perilously about the pavements and lawns oblivious of savage man, and exultant banks of snowballs escaping over the picturesque shingle- and iron-railed barriers of the old Clemons place, were just on the point of changing from their pale shade of willow bark into round fluffs of dazzling white as big as a boy’s head. These Lenten afternoons were moments of solitary poetry in his days. The still church, the long slanting rays which came through the coloured glass windows to the west; the faint perfumes that rose into the ogival shadows above the nave, emanating from the hair and handkerchiefs and bodices of lady worshippers, who made up the majority (and the subtle pleasure with which he felt the eyes of these fine women on his broadening back as he walked down to the chancel carrying the offertory); the pervasive, vibrant drone of the organ, which had always been like a physical caress to him; and the saintly beaked profile of the rector, Dr. Minor, with its high, peeled brows, and black, unruly hair, dominating an almost chinless jaw; and, finally, between the breathing of the organ pipes, and the shrill singing of the feminine congregation, Dr. Minor’s broad Virginia accents and consoling overtones and melancholy quavers--all these sensations produced a mingling of peace and the awareness of sacrifice, which was like a bath of goodness.