“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help,” read Mr. Boniface. And as he went on, the beautiful old poem with its tender, reassuring cadences somehow touched Frithiof, so that when they stood up to sing “Glory to Thee, my God, this night,” he did not cavil at each line as he would have done a little while before, but stood listening reverently, conscious of a vague desire for something in which he felt himself to be lacking. After all, the old beliefs which he had dismissed so lightly from his mind were not without a power and a beauty of their own.
“I wish I could be like these people,” he thought to himself, kneeling for the first time for years.
And though he did not hear a word of the prayer, and could not honestly have joined in it if he had heard, his mind was full of a longing which he could not explain. The fact was that in the past he had troubled himself very little about the matter, he had allowed the “Zeitgeist” to drive him as it would, and following the fashion of his companions, with a comfortable consciousness of having plenty to keep him in countenance, he had thrown off the old faiths.
He owned as much to Cecil the next day when, after breakfast, they chanced to be alone together for a few minutes.
“Have you found any Norwegian service in London, or will you come with us?” she asked unconsciously.
“Oh,” he replied, “I gave up that sort of thing long ago, and while you are out I will get on with some translation I have in hand.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said, coloring crimson; “I had no idea, or I should not have asked.”
But there was not the faintest shade of annoyance in Frithiof’s face; he seemed puzzled at her confusion.
“The services bored me so,” he explained. He did not add as he had done to Blanche that in his opinion religion was only fit for women, perhaps because it would have been difficult to make such a speech to Cecil, or perhaps because the recollection of the previous evening still lingered with him.
“Oh,” said Cecil, smiling as she recognized the boyishness of his remark; “I suppose every one goes through a stage of being bored. Roy used to hate Sunday when he was little; he used to have a Sunday pain which came on quite regularly when we were starting to chapel, so that he could stay at home.”