"Yes," said Juliet, giving her head a little nod, "that is my idea, and a very good idea it is too."
"I do not agree with you. You are under a delusion. What you are grasping after as happiness is not happiness, but only its empty shadow."
"Then I am content with the shadow," said Juliet. "I have tried having my own way, and I like it very much."
And her violet eyes flashed mischievous defiance at him.
"It will not satisfy you long," he said. "Nothing betrays and disappoints like self-will. There is no peace for us till we learn that God's way and not ours is the best, and learn to seek that rather than the gratification of our own desires."
"God's way!" So he wanted to talk religion to her. She had forgotten that he was a clergyman.
"But I am not sure that I care about peace," she said perversely; "to me the word has rather an insipid sound. I am afraid I enjoy strife and excitement. I dread nothing more than stagnation."
He smiled at her, much as he might have smiled at a wayward child. Then he pointed to the distant stretch of ocean shimmering in the sun's level rays.
"Look," he said, "at the sunlit sea, at that bank of cloud flushed with softest crimson, and the yellow glow where the sun is just sinking to the horizon. What an air of calm and hush there is! Does it not all breathe peace? Yet there is no stagnation there."
She did not answer him, but gazed in silence at the western sky, till slowly the colours faded and sea and clouds grew grey. Then she turned and began to scramble quickly down the rocks. She did not speak again till she was by her mother's side.