The Way to Peace | Page 9

on his
shoulder, and the hymn-book slipped from his gnarled old hands. The
knitting sisters began, one after another, to stab their needles into their
balls of gray yarn and roll their work up in their aprons.
"It's getting late, Eldress," one of them said, and glanced at the clock.
"Then I'll tell her she may come?" said Eldress Hannah, reluctantly.
"He can make the wrath of man to praise Him," Brother Nathan
encouraged her.
"Yee; but I never heard that He could make the foolishness of woman
do it," the old woman said, grimly.
As the brothers and sisters parted at the door of the sitting-room
Brother Nathan plucked at the Eldress's sleeve; "Is she very
wretched--Lydia? Where is she now, Eldress? Poor Lydy! poor little
Lydy!"
The fortnight of Athalia's absence wore greatly upon her husband.
Apprehension lurked in the back of his mind. In the mill, or out on the
farm, or when he sat down among his shabby, old, calf-skin books, he
was assailed by the memory of all her various fancies during their
married life. Some of them were no more remarkable or unexpected
than this interest in Shakerism. He began to be slowly frightened.
Suppose she should take it into her head--?
When her fortnight was nearly up and he was already deciding whether,
when he drove over to Depot Corners to meet her, he would take
Ginny's colt or the new mare, a letter came to say she was going to stay
a week longer.
"I believe," she wrote--her very pen, in the frantic down-hill slope of

her lines, betraying the excitement of her thoughts--"I believe that for
the first time in my life I have found my God!" The letter was full of
dashes and underlining, and on the last page there was a blistered
splash into which the ink had run a little on the edges.
Lewis Hall's heart contracted with an almost physical pang. "I must go
and get her right off," he said; "this thing is serious!" And yet, after a
wakeful night, he decided, with the extraordinary respect for her
individuality so characteristic of the man-- a respect that may be called
foolish or divine, as you happen to look at it--he decided not to go. If
he dragged her away from the Shakers against her will, what would be
gained? "I must give her her head, and let her see for herself that it's all
moonshine," he told himself, painfully, over and over; "my seeing it
won't accomplish anything." But he counted the hours until she would
come home.
When she came, as soon as he saw her walking along the platform
looking for him while he stood with his hand on Ginny's colt's bridle,
even before she had spoken a single word, even then he knew what had
happened-- the uplifted radiance of her face announced it.
But she did not tell him at once. On the drive home, in the dark
December afternoon, he was tense with apprehension; once or twice he
ventured some questions about the Shakers, but she put them aside with
a curious gentleness, her voice a little distant and monotonous; her
words seemed to come only from the surface of her mind. When he
lifted her out of the sleigh at their own door he felt a subtle resistance
in her whole body; and when, in the hall, he put his arms about her and
tried to kiss her, she drew back sharply and said:
"No!--PLEASE!" Then, as they stood there in the chilly entry, she burst
into a passionate explanation: she had been convicted and converted!
She had found her Saviour! She--
"There, there, little Tay," he broke in, sadly; "supper is ready, dear." He
heard a smothered exclamation--that it was smothered showed how
completely she was immersed in a new experience, one of the details of
which was the practice of self-control.
But, of course, that night they had it out. . . . When they came into the
sitting-room after supper she flung the news into his pale face: she
wished to join the Shakers. But she must have his consent, she added,
impatiently, because otherwise the Shakers would not let her come.

"That's the only thing I don't agree with them about," she said, candidly;
"I don't think they ought to make anything so solemn contingent upon
the 'consent' of any other human being. But, of course, Lewis, it's only
a form. I have left you in spirit, and that is what counts. So I told them I
knew you would consent."
She looked at him with those blue, ecstatic eyes, so oblivious to his
pain that for a moment a sort of impersonal amazement at such
self-centredness held him silent. But after the first shock he spoke with