The Voice | Page 8

the wounds of a friend."
"Are you my friend?" Philly asked, lifting her gray eyes suddenly.
Mr. Fenn was greatly confused; the text-books of the Western Seminary had not supplied him with the answer to such a question. He explained, hurriedly, that he was the friend of all who wished for salvation.
"I do not especially wish for it," Philippa said, very low.
For a moment John Fenn was silent with horror. "That one so young should be so hardened!" he thought; aloud, he bade her remember hell fire. He spoke with that sad and simple acceptance of the fact with which, even less than fifty years ago, men humbled themselves before the mystery which they had themselves created, of divine injustice. She must know, he said, his voice trembling with sincerity, that those who slighted the offers of grace were cast into outer darkness?
Philly said, softly, "Maybe."
"'Maybe?' Alas, it is, certainly! Oh, why, WHY do you absent yourself from the house of God?" he said, holding out entreating hands. Philippa made no reply. "Let us pray!" said the young man; and they knelt down side by side in the shadowy parlor. John Fenn lifted his harsh, melancholy face, gazing upward passionately, while he wrestled for her salvation; Philly, looking downward, tracing with a trembling finger the pattern of the beadwork on the ottoman before which she knelt, listened with an inward shiver of dismay and ecstasy. But when they rose to their feet she had nothing to say. He, too, was silent. He went away quite exhausted by his struggle with this impassive, unresisting creature.
He hardly spoke to Mary all the way home. "A hardened sinner," he was thinking. "Poor, lovely creature! So young and so lost!" Under Mary's incessant chatter, her tugs at the end of the reins, her little bursts of joy at the sight of a bird or a roadside flower, he was thinking, with a strange new pain--a pain no other sinner had ever roused in him--of the girl he had left. He knew that his arguments had not moved her. "I believe," he thought, the color rising in his face, "that she dislikes me! She says she loves Dr. Lavendar; yes, she must dislike me. Is my manner too severe? Perhaps my appearance is unattractive." He looked down at his coat uneasily.
As for Philly, left to herself, she picked up a bit of sewing, and her face, at first pale, grew slowly pink. "He only likes sinners," she thought; "and, oh, I am not a sinner!"

CHAPTER II
After that on Sabbath mornings Philippa sat with her father, in the silent upper chamber. At first Henry Roberts, listening--listening-- for the Voice, thought, rapturously, that at the eleventh hour he was to win a soul--the most precious soul in his world!--to his faith. But when, after a while, he questioned her, he saw that this was not so; she stayed away from other churches, but not because she cared for his church. This troubled him, for the faith he had outgrown was better than no faith.
"Do you have doubts concerning the soundness of either of the ministers--the old man or the young man?" he asked her, looking at her with mild, anxious eyes.
"Oh no, sir," Philly said, smiling.
"Do you dislike them--the young man or the old man?"
"Oh no, father. I love--one of them."
"Then why not go to his church? Either minister can give you the seeds of salvation; one not less than the other. Why not sit under either ministry?" "I don't know," Philippa said, faintly. And indeed she did not know why she absented herself. She only knew two things: that the young man seemed to disapprove of the old man; and when she saw the young man in the pulpit, impersonal and holy, she suffered. Therefore she would not go to hear either man.
When Dr. Lavendar came to call upon her father, he used to glance at Philippa sometimes over his spectacles while Henry Roberts was arguing about prophecies; but he never asked her why she stayed away from church; instead, he talked to her about John Fenn, and he seemed pleased when he heard that the young man was doing his duty in making pastoral calls. "And I--I, unworthy as I was!" Henry Roberts would say, "I heard the Voice, speaking through a sister's lips; and it said: Oh, sinner! for what, for what, what can separate, separate, from the love... Oh, nothing. Oh, nothing. Oh, nothing." He would stare at Dr. Lavendar with parted lips. "I HEARD IT," he would say, in a whisper.
And Dr. Lavendar, bending his head gravely, would be silent for a respectful moment, and then he would look at Philippa. "You are teaching Fenn's sister to sew?" he would say. "Very nice! Very nice!"
Philly saw a good deal of the sister that summer;