“I more than like it.”
She eyed him gravely. “I suppose it is because you are so grown up. Yet you are only four years older than I am. I wonder if I will ever get to like it. I hope not.”
“Well, it will be more comfortable for you if you do,—since you have to go,” said Gavan, with his faint, wintry smile.
She felt the kindness of his austere banter, and retorting, “I’d rather not be comfortable, then,” joined him in the sunlight on the broad, stone step, going on with quite a sense of companionship: “Only one thing I don’t so much mind—and that is the hymns. I am so glad when they come that I almost shout them. Sometimes—I’m telling you as quite a secret, you know—I shout as loud as I possibly can on purpose to disturb Aunt Rachel. I know it’s wrong, so don’t bother to tell me so; besides, it’s partly because I really like to shout. But I always do hope that some day they may leave me at home rather than have me making such a noise. People often turn round to look.”
Gavan laughed.
“You think that wicked no doubt?”
“No, I think it funny, and quite useless, I’m sure.”
After all, Gavan wasn’t a muff, as a boy fond of church might have been suspected of being.
Yet after the walk through the birch-woods and over a corner of moor to the bare little common where the church stood, and when they were all installed in the hard, familiar pew, a new and still more alienating impression came to her—alienating yet fascinating. A sense of awe crept over her and she watched Gavan in an absorbed, a dreamy wonder.
Eppie only associated prayers with a bedside; they were part of the toilet, so to speak—went in with the routine of hair-and tooth-brushing and having one’s bath. To pray in church, if one were a young person, seemed a mystifying, almost an abnormal oddity. She was accustomed to seeing in the sodden faces of the village children an echo to her own wholesome vacuity. But Gavan really prayed; that was evident. He buried his face in his arms. He thought of no one near him.