"Her interest in the Bible seemed founded upon the large opportunity it gave her for the exercise of rank unbelief. I was always hoping to overcome the tendency. But"—she shook her head—"if, as a treat, I allowed her to choose what portion of the Scripture should be read aloud, it was always the Revelation."
"Oh, I don't think that so depraved."
"Neither did I, till one Sunday, as I got to the words, 'And I, John, saw,' I was arrested by a movement from the child sitting at my feet. I looked down and saw the small face puckered with the concentrated essence of suspicion. 'Who saw it 'sides John?' she demanded. And that, briefly, has been her attitude ever since. I lament it, but I don't talk to her about it any more. The one Christian tenet that I am satisfied Val holds is the doctrine of the Resurrection. Strange—strange! Now, Emmie is like all the rest of the Ganos."
Ethan nodded. "Yes, Val is a stranger among us. Poor Val!"
Emmie was certainly a vision of innocent loveliness, as she went up to the chancel that Easter morning, to be received into the communion of the faithful. There was something poetic, something not wholly of this world, in her fragile beauty, her rapt and lighted look. Ethan recognized in the sweet face—never so unclouded as to-day—the subtle ecstasy of the devotee. Something in him stirred painfully, regretfully, answering to it with a sense of unwilling sympathy, of kinship that would not be denied. People in the church that day whispered to each other:
"Emmie Gano and her cousin are more alike than most brothers and sisters are."
Very different was the mutinous face of the elder girl, sitting beside Ethan in her mourning, looking neither at bishop nor white-robed brides of the Church, but with unreconciled, tear-filled eyes at the white cross, in memory of her father, that hung among the Easter decorations in the chancel. The wreath upon the lectern, that all the town knew to be the annual "In memoriam" to that Valeria Gano who had been in her grave these twenty years—for that, only Ethan of the dead woman's kindred had eyes and tender remembering.
"Father's cross looked very beautiful," Emmie said, in a hushed voice, to her grandmother that afternoon.
Mrs. Gano inclined her head.
"I am glad we chose calla lilies; he loved them," murmured Emmie.