“How do you mean?” asked Cecil, not quite seeing the connection.
“Not into the tables and chairs,” said Lance, who had clearly transgressed in this matter, and had applied the story to his own life with amusing simplicity.
“That’s right,” said Cecil. “God will be pleased if you try.”
“He can see us, but we can’t see him,” said Lance, in his sweet childish tones, quietly telling forth in implicit trust the truth that many a man longs to believe.
A minute after he came dancing out into the garden, his short, sunny curls waving in the summer wind, his cheeks glowing, his hazel eyes and innocent little mouth beaming with happiness.
“He looks like an incarnate smile,” thought Frithiof.
And then he remembered what Roy had told him of the father and mother, and he thought how much trouble awaited the poor child, and felt the same keen wish that Cecil had felt that he might be brought up in a way which should make him able to resist whatever evil tendencies he had inherited. “If anything can save him it will be such a home as this,” he reflected.
Then, as Cecil came out into the veranda, he joined her, and they walked together down one of the shady garden paths.
“I overheard your pupil this morning,” he began, and they laughed together over the child’s quaint remarks. “That was very good, his turning the story to practical account all by himself. He is a lucky little beggar to have you for his teacher. I wonder what makes a child so ready to swallow quite easily the most difficult things in heaven and earth?”
“I suppose because he knows he can’t altogether understand, and is willing to take things on trust,” said Cecil.