He turned at her command, and took her towards her father’s house. They walked in silence down the long Seminary path. She was dressed in light muslin with a violet on it, and wore ribbons that matched the violet. She had a square of white lace thrown over her bright hair. The meshes of the tracery from the elm-trees fell thickly under her quick tread. At the stone posts which guarded the great lawns, she hesitated; then set her feet resolutely out from the delicate net into the bright spaces of the open road.
“Mr. Bayard,” she said in her clear voice, “you are an honest man. It is better to be that than to be a minister.”
“If one cannot be both,” amended Bayard. “But to start in like this, with a slur attached to one’s name at the beginning,—I don’t suppose you understand how it dooms a fellow, Miss Carruth. Its equivalent would be almost enough to disbar a man in law, or to ruin him in medicine.”
“I understand the whole miserable subject!” cried Helen hotly. “I am sick to my soul of it! I wish”—She checked herself. “Let me see,” she added more calmly. “What was it they tormented you about? Eternal punishment?”
“I managed to escape on that,” said Bayard. “I don’t know anything about it, and I said so. I think, myself, there is a good deal of cheap talk afloat on that subject. Our newspapers and novels are full of it. It is about the only difficult doctrine in theology that outsiders understand the relations of; so they stick on that, and make the most of it. It is an easy way of making the Christian religion intolerable—if one wants to. My difficulty was rather with—I see you know something of our technical terms—with what we call verbal inspiration.”
“Oh yes.” Helen nodded. “Whether ‘The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation’ was inspired by Almighty God; or ‘Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,—Reuben, Gad, and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali,’ and all that. I know.... Inspired moonshine! I am a little bit of a heretic myself, Mr. Bayard; but I’m not—I’m not as honest as you; I’m not pious, either.”
“I hope you don’t think I am pious!” began Bayard resentfully.
But she laughed sweetly in his frowning face. They stood at her father’s high stone steps. The Anniversary company were chatting in the parlors.
“Good-night,” she said in a lower tone; and then more gently, “and good-by.”
He started slightly at the word; turned as if he would have said something, but said it not. He took her hand in silence; then perceived that she had withdrawn it suddenly, coldly, it seemed, and had vanished from him up the steps of stone.