"It teaches us to let such destructive books alone. God himself specially warned the Israelites not even 'to make inquiry' about the religion of the Canaanites; they did it, of course, and you know the result as well as I do. And men these days are so set up with their long dominion and the varieties of strange knowledge they have accepted that they do not require any Eve to pull this apple of disobedience and doubt of God. They manage it themselves."
"Jessy Caird, you have no right to impute evil to either men or books that are only known to you through some critic's opinion." Then he rose and, standing with uplifted eyes, said with singular emotion:
"'O God, that men would see a little clearer!
Or judge less harshly where they cannot see.
O God, that men would draw a little nearer
To one another! They'd be nearer Thee!'"
With these words he left Jessy and went to the room where the fateful books were waiting for him.
And Jessy could say no more. But she threw her knitting out of her hands and let them drop hopelessly into her lap.
"When men stop reasoning, they quote poetry," she mused angrily. "I never heard Ian quote a whole verse before, unless he was in the pulpit; well, I have warned him, and now I can only hope he will feel that sense of utter desolation in his soul that I always felt after a few sentences of Schopenhauer or Darwin. There! I hear him opening the box. Now begin the to-and-fro paths of Doubt and Persuasion, days full of anxious brooding, nights full of shadowy chasms, that nothing but Faith can bridge. But Ian has Faith—at least in his creed—and there are spiritual influences that no one can predict or resist, for the way of the Spirit is the way of the wind." Motionless she sat for a few minutes, and then rose hastily, saying softly as she did so, "Wherever is Marion? I wonder she was not seeking me ere this."
She found Marion in her own room. She was kneeling at the open window with her elbows on the broad stone sill, and her cheeks were almost touching the sweet little mignonettes. A tender smile brooded over her face, a tender light was in her eyes, she was lost in a new, ineffable sense of something full of delight—some pleasure strangely personal that was hers and hers alone.
"I am lonely without you, Marion. Why did you run away from me?"
"I thought Father was with you and, perhaps, saying something I would not like—about our visitors."
"What could he say that was not pleasant? I am sure they were everything that any reasonable person could expect."