The Way to Peace | Page 4

you don't understand that, I suppose."
"I guess I do--after a fashion," he said, smiling at her. It was only in
love's fashion, for really he was incapable of quite understanding her.
To the country lawyer of sober piety and granite sense of duty, the rich
variety of her moods was a continual wonder and sometimes a painful
bewilderment. But whether he understood the impetuous
inconsequence of her temperament "after a fashion," or whether he
failed entirely to follow the complexity of her thought, he met all her
fancies with a sort of tender admiration. People said that Squire Hall
was henpecked; they also said that he had married beneath him. His
father had been a judge and his grandfather a minister; he himself was a
graduate of a fresh-water college, which later, when he published his
exegesis on the Prophet Daniel, had conferred its little degree upon him
and felt that he was a "distinguished son." With such a lineage he might
have done better, people said, than to marry that girl, who was the most
fickle creature and no housekeeper, and whose people--this they told
one another in reserved voices--were PLAY-ACTORS! Athalia's
mother, who had been the "play-actor," had left her children an
example of duty-- domestic as well as professional duty--faithfully
done. As she did not leave anything else, Athalia added nothing to the
Hall fortune; but Lewis's law practice, which was hardly more than
conveyancing now and then, was helped out by a sawmill which the
Halls had owned for two generations. So, as things were, they were

able to live in humdrum prosperity which gave Lewis plenty of time to
browse about among his grandfather's old theological books, and
by-and-by to become a very sound Hebrew scholar, and spared Athalia
much wholesome occupation which would have been steadying to her
eager nature. She was one of those people who express every passing
emotion, as a flower expresses each wind that sways it upon its stalk.
But with expression the emotion ended.
"But she isn't fickle," Lewis had defended her once to a privileged
relation who had made the accusation, basing it on the fact that Athalia
had sewed her fingers off for the Missionary Society one winter and
done nothing the next--"Athalia ISN'T fickle," Lewis explained; "fickle
people are insincere. Athalia is perfectly sincere, but she is temporary;
that's all. Anyway, she wants to do something else this winter, and
'Thalia must have her head."
"Your head's better than hers, young man," the venturesome relative
insisted.
"But it must be her head and not mine, Aunty, when it comes to doing
what she thinks is right, even if it's wrong," he said, smiling.
"Well, tell her she's a little fool!" cried the old lady, viciously.
"You can't do that with 'Thalia," Lewis explained, patiently, "because it
would make her unhappy. She takes everything so dreadfully hard; she
feels things more than other people do."
"Lewis," said the little, old, wrinkled, privileged great-aunt, "think a
little less of her feelings and a little more of your own, or you'll make a
mess of things."
Lewis Hall was too respectful to tell the old lady what he thought of
such selfish advice; he merely did not act upon it. Instead, he went on
giving a great deal of thought to Athalia's "feelings." That was why he
and she were climbing the hill in the dewy silence of this August
morning. Athalia had "felt" that she wanted to see the view--though it
would have been better for her to have rested in the station, Lewis
thought;--("I ought to have coaxed her out of it," he reproached
himself.) It certainly was a hard walk, considering that it followed a
broken night in the sleeping-car. They had left the train at five o'clock
in the morning, and were sitting in the station awaiting the express
when Athalia had had this impulse to climb the hill. "It looks pretty
steep," Lewis objected; and she flung out her hands with an impatient

gesture.
"I love to climb!" she said. So here they were, almost at the top, panting
and toiling, Athalia's skirts wet with dew, and Lewis's face drawn with
fatigue.
"Look!" she said; "it's all open! We can sit down and see all over the
world!" She left the road, springing lightly through the fringing bay and
briers toward an open space on the hillside. "There is a gate in the
wall!" she called out; "it seems to be some sort of enclosure. Lewis,
help me to open the gate! Hurry! What a queer place! What do you
suppose it is?"
The gate opened into a little field bounded by a stone wall; the grass
had been lately mowed, and the stubble, glistening with dew, showed
the curving swaths of the scythe; across