"Weel, nothin' to boast on," replied Malcom; "I tho't that if ye had na one a-lookin' after the garden save Hannibal's 'spook,' ye'd have but a ghaistly crop. But I'm a-thinkin' there's mair than a ghaist been here."
"It was Arden Lacey," said Edith, frankly, but with deepening color.
Malcom, in telling his wife about it, said, "She looked like the rose-bush, a' in bloom, that she was a-stonnin' beside."
Edith, seeing the mischievous twinkle in her little friend's eye, added hastily, "Both Mrs. Lacey and her son have been very kind to us in our sickness and trouble, as well as yourself. But, Mr. McTrump," she continued, anxious to change the subject, also eager to speak on the topic uppermost in her thoughts, "I think I am beginning to 'learn it a',' as you said, about that good Friend who suffered for us that we might not suffer. What you and your wife said to me the other day led me to read the 'Gude Book' after I got home. I don't feel as I did then. I think I can trust Him now."
Malcom dropped his hoe and came over into the path beside her.
"God be praised!" he said. "I gie je the right hond o' fellowship an' welcome ye into the kirk o' the Lord. Ye noo belong to the household o' faith, an' God's true Israel, an' may His gude Spirit guide ye into all truth."
The little man spoke very earnestly, and with a certain dignity and authority that his small stature and rude working-dress could not diminish. A sudden feeling of solemnity and awe came over Edith, and she felt as if she were crossing the mystic threshold and entering the one true church consisting of all believers in Christ.
For a moment she reverently bowed her head, and a sweeter sense of security came over her, as if she were no longer an outsider, but had been received into the household.
Malcom, "a priest unto God" through his faith, officiated at the simple ceremony. The birds sang the choral service. The wind-shaken roses, blooming around her, with their sweet ordos, were the censers and incense, and the sunlighted garden, the earliest sacred place of Bible history, where the first fair woman worshipped, was the hallowed ground of the initiatory rite.
"Why, Mr. McTrump, I feel almost as if I had joined the church," said
Edith, after a moment.
"An' sae ye ha' afore God, an' I hope ere long ye'll openly profess yer faith before men."