'Ah,' said Cameron, 'you have been reading those, have you? Oh yes, she was never afraid to read anything that was written, but she distinguished between faith and creed. She said she did not try to explain or understand God, only to believe in Him. She is quite right. It is the hard names, the popular orthodoxies, the iron creeds, that take the soul and heart and warmth out of religion. When you were little, she did nothing more than show you God as your Father, and Christ as your Saviour, to be tenderly loved and obeyed, and gone to for refuge and comfort.'
'No,' said Hermie.
'No; it was her way. She wanted the love of God to be a living thing to you all—a glad, warm, spontaneous thing, like the love you bore us, only deeper. She would have no lines and rules and analyses of it while you were small. It was not a thing she actually spoke about very often, but white hours, find room for themselves at times—on plain Mondays and Saturdays as often as on quiet Sundays, and she had a way of making the influence of them run, clear, fresh, pleasant streams through the mud-flats of life. Can you realise in any degree what it is to me to find her daughter with such thoughts, Hermie?' His voice was very low. Hermie pulled the pin from the plain tight knob, and let all her hair hide her flushed face again.
'If—if only I had known you thought like this!' she muttered.
'Yes,' he said; 'it is a thing I shall never be able to put away from my mind again, that I did not let you know. A man gets in the way of keeping quiet things like these to himself, but I should not have forgotten I had children. I knew Miss Browne was a good woman, whatever her faults, and I felt that I might leave you to her. Don't think I am excusing myself.'
'It was not your fault, darling, darling,' Hermie said, and clung to him; 'but think how miserable we are—all of us, even poor little Floss! How can He forget us like this?'
Cameron's blue eyes looked out at the blue sky.
'Not to understand, only to believe. He does not lead us always through green pastures. The severe and daily discipline makes us shrink, no doubt. But we have to go on.'
'Oh, darling, I do love you, I do love you!' wept the girl.
'Tie up your hair, childie, and we will go down and sit among the roses, if any are still alive. I am quite strong enough to walk.'