"'I sat beneath a hollow tree,
The blast it hollow blew.
I thought upon the hollow world,
And all its hollow crew.
Ambition and its hollow schemes,
The hollow hopes we follow,
The world and all its hollow dreams—
All hollow, hollow, hollow!'"
"That's the way it seems to you now," she said. "It's the reaction. But you mustn't let it make you pessimistic. When you get to feeling like that you'll have to do like old Abraham did, quit looking at all the sinners in Sodom, and hunt around for the ten good men."
A whole row of Sunday-school lessons rose up in Mrs. Bisbee's mind. She had taught a class for thirty years in the vine-covered stone church whose spire she could see from her window, and Lloyd was used to her startling and unexpected application of Scripture texts.
"Or better still," she continued, "turn your back on entire Sodom, and look away to the plains where the faithful pitched their tents. The world is full of that kind of people to-day as it was then, the faithful who never join themselves to the idols of the heathen, but who tend their flocks and live good peaceful lives, and in all their journeyings, wherever they go, raise an altar to the Lord.
"It's the marriages that are founded on that rock that never fall," she added reverently, her mind skipping from the tent-dwellers of Genesis to the wise builder in the parables with the ease of long practice. "'And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not; for it was founded upon a rock.'"
"Sometimes just the wife's part is built on it. She's the only one that raises the altar. Sometimes the man is the one. Of course that's better than all being on the sand, and saves many a marriage from being the wreck it would have been if they'd left God out of it altogether. There! I never did think it all out in words quite as straight and clear and convincing to myself before. But I've often had the idea come to me when I'd be sitting in church looking at old Judge Moore's white head in the front pew, and thinking of the trouble he'd had—the sorrow and accidents and misfortune that have beat on his house—and his faith standing up bigger and stronger than ever. Even his wife's death couldn't shake it."
Here she paused to lean nearer the window and nod and smile at some one driving past the house.
"It's Agnes Waring," she explained, as Lloyd looked up too late. "Or Agnes Bond, I should say. I never can remember to call her that, although she's been married over two years. Now there's a happy marriage if ever there was one. The good old-fashioned sort like the Judge's, for they're both of the faithful. And do you know, my dear," she continued lightly, "I shall always hold you responsible for that. It was your making such a picture out of Agnes at that Martha Washington affair that brought her out of her shell and gave John Bond a chance to discover her. Miss Sarah thinks so too. By the way, she was here yesterday, and she told me that she has about consented to break up housekeeping and go to live with Agnes. It's so lonely for her since poor Miss Marietta died."
"Yes, I know," said Lloyd softly, thinking of the happy release that had come to Miss Marietta only the week before.
"Now, there was another case," resumed Mrs. Bisbee. "Nobody who saw her lying there in that beautiful dress that was to have been her wedding gown, and with that wonderful smile lighting up her face, could doubt what sort of a foundation she and Murray Cathright built on. That was a love that outlasted time and reached past even death into eternity itself. So don't you go to doubting that it doesn't exist any more, my dear."