“But why?”
“It’s so long—so stupid.”
Gavan loitered about before her on the door-step, his hands in his pockets. Evidently he could find no ready comment for her accusation.
“Every one looks so silly and so sleepy,” she went on. “Mr. MacNab is so ugly. Besides, he is an unkind man: he whips his children all the time; not whippings when they deserve it—like mine,”—Gavan looked at her, startled by this impersonally just remark,—“he whips them because he is cross himself. Why should he tell us about being good if he is as ill-tempered as possible? And he has a horrid voice,—not like the village people, who talk in a dear, funny way,—he has a horrid, pretend voice. And you stand up and sit down and have nothing to do for ages and ages. I don’t see how anybody can like church.”
Gavan kicked vaguely at the lichen spots.
“Do you really like it?”
“Yes,” he answered, with his shy abruptness.
“But why? It’s different, I know, for old people—I don’t suppose that they mind things any longer; but I don’t see how a boy, a young boy”—and Eppie allowed herself a reproachful emphasis—“can possibly like it.”
“I’m used to it, you see, and I don’t think of it in your way at all.” Gavan could not speak to this funny child of its sacred associations. In church he had always felt that he and his mother had escaped to a place of reality and peace. He entered, through his love for her, into the love of the sense of sanctuary from an ominous and hostile world. And he was a boy with a deep, sad sense of God.
“But you don’t like it,” said the insistent Eppie.