Closing the book, while her quiet eyes shone in the gleaming dusk, she
said a few simple things about the Words of Christ, and how the human
soul may feed on them--the Word of Love--the Word of Purity--the Word of
Service. While she was still speaking, the door opened and Rachel came
in. It had been agreed between her and Janet that although she had no
objection to the prayers, she was not to be asked to take part in them.
So that Janet's pulses fluttered a little when she appeared. But there
was no outward sign of it. The speaker finished what she had to say,
while the eyes of her three hearers were sometimes on her face and
sometimes on the wide cornfield beyond the open window, where the harvest
moon, as yet only a brilliant sickle, was rising. The Earth Bread
without--the "Bread of Life" within; even in Jenny's primitive mind,
there was a mingling of the two ideas, which brought a quiet joy. She sat
with parted lips, feeling that she liked Miss Leighton very much, and
would try to please her with the cows.
Betty, meanwhile, beside her, passed into a waking dream. She was
thinking of a soldier in the village: the blacksmith's son, a tall,
handsome fellow, who had just arrived on leave for ten days. She had
spent Sunday evening wandering in the lanes with him. She felt
passionately that she must see him again--soon.
The little reading passed into the Lord's Prayer. Then it was over and
the two girls disappeared to bed. Janet felt a little awkward when she
was left alone with Rachel, but she went back to her sewing and began to
talk of the day's news of the war. Rachel answered at random, and very
soon said good-night.
But long after everybody else in the solitary farmhouse was asleep,
Rachel Henderson was sitting up in bed, broad awake, her hands round her
knees. The window beside her was open. She saw the side of the hill and
the bare down in which it ended, with the moonlight bright upon it, and
the dark woods crowning it. There were owls calling from the hill, and
every now and then a light wind rustled through the branches of an oak
that stood in the farm-yard.
She was thinking of what Janet had said about the "Words" of Christ--the
Word of Purity--and the Word of Love. How often she had heard her
father read and expound that chapter! very differently as far as
phraseology--perhaps even as far as meaning--went, yet with all his
heart, like Janet. He was an Anglican clergyman who had done missionary
service in the Canadian West. He had been dead now three years, and her
mother five. She had bitterly missed them both when she was in her worst
need; yet now she was thankful they had died--before--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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