Against this awful accusation Bayard had no reply; and the old Professor turned about ponderously, like a man whose body refused to obey the orders of his shocked and stricken mind.
“How can I see my daughter, my daughter, the wife of a man whom the Ancient Faith has cast out?” he pleaded piteously.
He lifted his shrunken hands, as if he reasoned before an invisible tribunal. His attitude and expression were so solemn that Bayard felt it impossible to interrupt the movement by any mere lover’s plea. Perhaps, for the first time, he understood then what it meant to the old man to defend the beliefs that had ruled the world of his youth and vigor; he perceived that they, too, suffered who seemed to be the inflicters of suffering; that they, too, had their Calvary—these determined souls who doggedly died by the cross of the old Faith in whose shelter their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had lived and prayed, had battled and triumphed. Bayard felt that his own experience at that moment was an intrusion upon the sanctuary of a sacred struggle. He bowed his head before his Professor, and left the study in silence.
But Helen, who had the small reverence for the theologic drama characteristic of those who have been reared upon its stage, put her beautiful arms around his neck and, laughing, whispered:—
“Leave the whole system of Old School Orthodoxy to me! I can manage!”
“You may manage him,” smiled Bayard, “but can you manage it?”
“Wait a day, and see!” said Helen.
He would have waited a thousand for the kiss with which she lifted up the words.
The next day she wrote him, at Windover, where he was dutifully trying to preach as if nothing had happened:—