The Voice | Page 8

at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap, then out of the
window at the big roan biting at the hitching-post or standing very still

to let Mary rub his silky nose. But John Fenn looked only at Philippa.
Of her father's heresies he would not, he said, do more than remind her
that the wiles of the devil against her soul might present them-selves
through her natural affections; but in regard to her failure to wait upon
the means of grace he spoke without mercy, for, he said, "faithful are
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