"Then that's settled," replied Martha cheerfully; "and now I must go back to the kitchen to see the oven, which is apt to burn the pie-crust without baking it, unless duly warned and admonished by them that have authority. You'd wonder how an oven could burn without baking; but human nature is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and our kitchen oven is one of the worst."
"Yet, Martha, God is very good, and therefore human nature is sometimes very good likewise; I have certainly proved it of late."
"Well, you see, sir, it is in this way," expounded Martha. "God made man in His own image; and though man spoils himself in the making, and loses his proper pattern, and falls out of shape, the original mould is not broken yet—nor never will be, trust the Lord for that!"
CHAPTER V.
Water-lilies.
I will crown you as my queen
By my soul's subjection,
For you all your life have been
What I think perfection.
Paul felt leaving Oxford more than he would have cared to confess; and the weeks he spent at home would have been a dreary time had they not been brightened by the smiles and the sympathy of Alice Martin.
To Paul's vigorous and energetic nature, Alice was very soothing and restful. It was true that she did not understand more than half of what he said to her, but she listened to it all, which was nearly as good; and "a girl could not be expected to enter into a man's thoughts and feelings," Paul said to himself, not having yet graduated in Cupid's University. And Paul came very near to loving Alice in those days, with the sort of comfortable, common-place, every-day love which satisfies ninety-nine men and one woman out of every hundred. But Paul, unfortunately, happened to be the one, and Alice one of the ninety-nine; so there was not much chance of their making one another happy.
One day in the summer in which Paul left Oxford, he and Joanna, with Edgar Ford and Alice Martin, went for a picnic to Chayford Wood. Edgar had ceased to make himself disagreeable to Alice, no man being able to perform the impossible for too long a time at a stretch; and Alice sunned herself in his reawakened smiles, not even her love for Paul having the power to stamp out her desire for universal popularity.
As they were sitting by the lake Alice remarked: "Isn't it funny how a lovely scene like this makes one feel good and happy, and yet sad with longing for something that one has never heard of?"