'Here's Granny!' cried Willie, abandoning his thumb to seek the protection of the friendly linsey-woolsey petticoat.
'Ay, so it be. My granny sits in the parlour on Sunday afternoons, with her blinds drawn down, and reads her Bible. She's a godly old woman, she is!'
And Polly took her departure with a conscious sniff, as if deploring the depravity of her neighbours.
Peggy was very much upset.
'Is it really wrong to look after the bees and amuse babies on Sunday?' she asked Father afterwards.
'No, dear, certainly not. The Pharisees came to our Lord with just such a question, and you know He answered them that it was right to do well on the Sabbath. God did not mean it to be a day of misery, but a specially joyful and happy day, in which we were to think a good deal about Him. Sometimes we can show our love for Him quite as well by helping others as by reading our Bibles or going to church, though we should not neglect that either. As for shutting ourselves up on Sundays, and thinking it is wrong to look at the beautiful things around us, that is mere ignorance, for Nature is like a wonderful book, written by God's hand, and the birds and the bees and the flowers are all pages out of it for those who have eyes to read them rightly.'
Peggy thought of this as she sat among the ruins watching the sunset that night. The sky, flaming in bands of crimson, violet and orange, looked like the very gate of heaven, a golden city which you had only to cross the hills to reach—surely another page in that book of which Father had spoken.
'It's like one of the pictures in the Interpreter's house in the "Pilgrim's Progress,"' she said to herself; 'or Christian and Hopeful on the Delectable Mountains, when they looked through the glass, and thought they saw "something like the gate, and also some of the glory of the place."'
She stayed a long, long time among the crumbling old walls, watching the gold fade gradually out of the sky. It was very still and peaceful in there, and she liked to sit and think how the Abbey must have looked in those strange, bygone days when the little steps had led to a dormitory, and the broken pillars had held up the roof of a church, whose tinkling bell had rung out at sunset, calling to prayer those old monks who slept so quietly in their forgotten graves.
An owl began to hoot in the woods beyond the river, a great stag-beetle came droning by, and the bats flew over her head with their shrill little cry, flitting here and there like night swallows.