'I wonder,' he said reflectively, 'what limitation you would put to
their power? To give you an instance; you admit that had your aunt been
at church to-day you could not have taken charge of that poor baby, or
afterwards helped, as you most certainly did help, its tired mother.
Now, do you suppose that this baby's guardian angel provoked, by some
way best known to itself, your excellent aunt's headache?'
'Laugh at me,' she said, smiling a little vexedly, 'but not at our own
or at other people's guardian angels; for I suppose even you would admit
that if they are with us they have feelings which may be hurt?'
As he held the wicket-gate open for her to pass through from the cliff
path into the pine-wood boundary of Monk's Eype, Wantley said suddenly:
'I wonder if you have ever read a story called "In the Wrong Paradise"?'
and as Cecily shook her head he added: 'Then never do so! I am sure your
guardian angel would not at all approve of the moral it sets out to
convey.' And then, just as she was going up from the flagged terrace
into the central hall of the villa, he said, the laughter dying wholly
out of his voice: 'And if I may do so, let me tell you that I hope, with
all my heart, that I may ultimately be found worthy to enter whichever
may happen to be _your_ Paradise.'
A look of great kindness, of understanding more than he had perhaps
meant to convey, came over Cecily's candid eyes. She made no answer, but
as she ran upstairs to her aunt's room she said to herself: 'Poor
fellow! Of course he means the Church. Oh, I must pray hard that he may
some day find his way to his father's Paradise and mine!'
She found her aunt lying down, and apparently asleep, on the broad
comfortable old sofa which was placed across the bottom of the bed,
opposite the window. The pretty room, hung with blue Irish linen forming
an admirable background to Mrs. Robinson's fine water-colours, looked
delightfully cool to the girl's tired eyes; the blinds had been pulled
down, and Cecily, walking on tiptoe past her aunt, sat down in a low
easy-chair, content to wait quietly till Miss Wake should open her eyes.
But the long walk, the sea-air, had made the watcher drowsy, and soon
Cecily also was asleep.
Then, within the next few moments, a strange thing happened to Cecily
Wake.
After what seemed a long time, she apparently awoke to a sight which
struck her as odd rather than unexpected.
On the elder Miss Wake's chest, nestling down among the folds of her
white shawl, sat a tiny angel, whose chubby countenance was quite
familiar to Cecily, as his brown curls and pale, sensitive face
recalled, though, of course, in a benignant and peaceful sense, the
little child whom she had soothed in church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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