Franklin followed her, everything in him blazing with love and the ache to touch.
All the west was draped with red, and the sun, conscious of having given great joy to the fading day, sank with the indescribable dignity of a beneficent monarch to his rest. Sky and water paid homage as he went and the very breeze seemed to hold its breath to watch the passing.
"Isn't it wonderful?" whispered Beatrix, touched with the beauty and magic of it.
"Yes," said Franklin.
"I often wonder how there can be skeptics in the world with such a proof as this of the great Father. Don't you?"
"Yes," he said again.
"The sun, the moon, the stars, spring, summer, the fall,—everything so regular, so honest, so gentle, so awful, so human and spiritual and divine. Why look at anything but nature for a revelation of God?"
Franklin forgot the sunset and looked at this girl of many sides and moods. She had surprised him so often that he half-expected to discover in her expression the self-consciousness of a pose. Instead he saw the wistful, humble look on her lovely face that he had seen on the faces of French peasant women who, standing in the fields in which they worked so hard for a bare living, bowed their heads at the sound of the Angelus, and once again he was back in his dream with her hand in his, standing on the threshold of a home, listening with infinite joy to the laughter of little children.
It was not until the sun had gone and the last redness in the sky had faded that he heard her sigh, and saw her shiver a little and turn away.
XXVIII