Ellen shook her head. There was nothing the matter with Matthew in the sense in which her father spoke, yet there was everything the matter with him.
Suddenly tears seemed an inadequate expression of her trouble. Her father's face, seen above hers, was pitying, yet a little amused. The woes of childhood were so small—he wondered whether it was a sick kitten or a lame horse that had stirred Ellen's tender heart.
"Now, Ellen, tell me what is the matter."
Ellen sat up and dried her eyes on her father's large, smooth handkerchief. She remembered—oh, blessed relief!—that of course her father could stop Matthew. Matthew was to go away to learn to be a physician; he could not be a Seventh-Day Baptist!
"I ran away from meeting," she confessed, feeling the first doubt of her course.
Levis's face was grave, but his eyes twinkled.
"Why?"
"It was so long and I got so tired looking at half a tree and a little grass, and at the brothers and sisters and Grandfather's white beard."
"Why, Ellen!" Levis frowned, not in anger, but so that he might concentrate both physical and mental vision upon his daughter.