The church, like the school, lay a couple of miles south of The Dale, away at the other side of a great hill. There were two roads leading thither. The one used by the school children on week-days was called the Short Cut. It ran down The Dale lane, crossed the pond beside MacAllister's mill, went up the opposite bank, over a wild half-cleared stretch of land called The Slash, through old Sandy McLachlan's wood, and by way of his rickety gate out on to the public highway a few yards from the school. It was much shorter this way than going "down the line," though strange to say it took far longer to traverse it on a schoolday, for it was a very enjoyable road indeed, from which one was ever making side excursions after berries or nuts or wild grapes, and which admitted of endless ways of beguiling dull time, and rendering oneself late for school. For various reasons the church-going population took to the public highway on Sabbaths. Those who drove went this way from necessity, and those who didn't went because they were always picked up before they had gone half a mile. Besides, parents had long since learned that Sabbath clothes as well as Sabbath decorum were apt to suffer from the conveniences of the Short Cut. William Gordon alone took this solitary road on Sabbath afternoons, for he loved the loneliness and quiet of the woods. This arrangement suited everyone except Elizabeth. Her heart always suffered a pang as they all turned up the lane together, and her father went away alone in the opposite direction. Once she had begged so hard to accompany him that he had yielded, and she had walked by his side, holding his hand, in silent sympathy, all the way over the sunny fields and through the cool green shadows of the woods. She had been quiet and good and he had said she was his little comforter, but Elizabeth had never gone again. It was not that she had found the walk dull in comparison to the companionship of the regular highway, for Elizabeth would have walked through a fiery furnace with her father in preference to any other road. But that wise older self had told her that her father preferred to be alone. She could not have told how she knew, but she was seldom mistaken in her intuition and followed it. And so, though it wrung her heart to see him go alone, she merely watched him with loving eyes, until his bowed head and thin, stooped shoulders disappeared from view in the willowy ravine. Those who walked started only a few minutes before the phaeton, for if they were not picked up by Martin's big double buggy on the Champlain Road, then the MacAllisters would take them in at the corner, or they would be gathered to the bosoms of the Wully Johnstones before they had gone many rods down the line.