To Miss Gimp, the one salient point, amidst the solemnities of the day, had been that pulpit notice. She had put new strings to her bonnet for the occasion. Mrs. Gimp, being more immediately and personally affected, had modestly remained away from church.
Glory McWhirk went straight through the village, home; and out to her little room in the sunny side of the low, sloping roof. This was her winter nook. She had a shadier one, looking the other way, for summer.
"I wonder if it's all true!" she cried, silently, in her soul, while she stood for a minute with bonnet and shawl still on, looking out from her little window, dreamily, over the dazzle of the snow, even as her half-blinded thought peered out from its own narrowness into the infinite splendor of the promise of God—"I wonder if God will ever make me beautiful! I wonder if I shall ever have a real, great joyfulness, that isn't a make believe!"
Glory called her fancies so. They followed her still. She lived yet in an ideal world. The real world—that is, the best good of it—had not come close enough to her, even in this, her widely amended condition, to displace the other. Remember—this child of eighteen had missed her childhood; had known neither father nor mother, sister nor brother.
Don't think her simple, in the pitiful meaning of the word; but she still enacted, in the midst of her plain, daily life, wonderful dreams that nobody could have ever suspected; and here, in her solitary chamber, called up at will creatures of imagination who were to her what human creatures, alas! had never been. Above all, she had a sister here, to whom she told all her secrets. This sister's name was Leonora.
CHAPTER XVII.
FROST-WONDERS.
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"No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung; Like some tall palm, the mystic fabric sprung. Majestic silence!" Heber. |