As she walked toward the cutter, in which Andy Pond was already seated, the Deacon went up to her with visible hesitation. Involuntarily Bosworth also moved nearer. He heard the Deacon say: “I’m glad to hear that Saul is able to be up and around.”
She turned her small head on her rigid neck, and lifted the lids of marble.
“Yes, I guess he’ll sleep quieter now.—And her too, maybe, now she don’t lay there alone any longer,” she added in a low voice, with a sudden twist of her chin toward the fresh black stain in the grave-yard snow. She got into the cutter, and said in a clear tone to Andy Pond: “’S long as we’re down here I don’t know but what I’ll just call round and get a box of soap at Hiram Pringle’s.”
THE SEED OF THE FAITH
I
The blinding June sky of Africa hung over the town. In the doorway of an Arab coffee-house a young man stood listening to the remarks exchanged by the patrons of the establishment, who lay in torpid heaps on the low shelf bordering the room.
The young man’s caftan was faded to a dingy brown, but the muslin garment covering it was clean, and so was the turban wound about his shabby fez.
Cleanliness was not the most marked characteristic of the conversation to which he lent a listless ear. It was no prurient curiosity that fixed his attention on this placid exchange of obscenities: he had lived too long in Morocco for obscenities not to have lost their savour. But he had never quite overcome the fascinated disgust with which he listened, nor the hope that one among the talkers would suddenly reveal some sense of a higher ideal, of what, at home, the earnest women he knew used solemnly to call a Purpose. He was sure that, some day, such a sign would come, and then—
Meanwhile, at that hour, there was nothing on earth to do in Eloued but to stand and listen—