“I wish you would come in a moment,” said Ward, very gently; “you know my wife always likes to see you, and I want to show you some books in which I think you would be interested.”
Without reply, Anna passed through the gate which he held open for her, and they entered the house together. Mrs. Ward met them, and they all went into the professor’s study.
In a few moments Anna was lost in the realm of books so long self-closed to her experience. She sat at his desk, and Ward handed her and heaped about her rare and beautiful volumes until she became bewildered with the sense of intellectual richness and complexity. She looked up at last, as he bent over her, turning the leaves of a beautiful old Italian edition of Dante’s “Commedia,” and, with a smile beneath which her lips trembled, she asked, like a child:—
“Tell me truly, is all this for me, righteously, safely?”
“Did I not tell you?” he asked gently. “‘All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.’”
With that day Anna returned to the long-sealed books of her father’s love and her own. She read and studied under Professor Ward’s guidance and direction, steadily and with eager delight. She did this with no further misgiving or doubt. He had succeeded in satisfying her conscience, and she moved joyfully along the clear lines of her inherited intellectual choice.
As for her father and the example of renunciation he had given her, her heart was at rest. That which was perfect being come for him, was not that which had been in part done away?
CHAPTER XVIII
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;