Donal remaining silent, Ginevra presently returned him his own question:
“How did you like the sermon, Donal?”
“Div ye want me to say, mem?” he asked.
“I do, Donal,” she answered.
“Weel, I wad jist say, in a general w’y, ’at I canna think muckle o’ ony sermon ’at micht gar a body think mair o’ the precher nor o’ him ’at he comes to prech aboot. I mean, ’at I dinna see hoo onybody was to lo’e God or his neebour ae jot the mair for hearin’ yon sermon last nicht.”
“But might not some be frightened by it, and brought to repentance, Donal?” suggested the girl.
“Ou aye; I daur say; I dinna ken. But I canna help thinkin’ ’at what disna gie God onything like fair play, canna dee muckle guid to men, an’ may, I doobt, dee a heap o’ ill. It’s a pagan kin’ o’ a thing yon.”
“That’s just what I was feeling—I don’t say thinking, you know—for you say we must not say think when we have taken no trouble about it. I am sorry for Mr. Duff, if he has taken to teaching where he does not understand.”
They had left the city behind them, and were walking a wide open road, with a great sky above it. On its borders were small fenced fields, and a house here and there with a garden. It was a plain-featured, slightly undulating country, with hardly any trees—not at all beautiful, except as every place under the heaven which man has not defiled is beautiful to him who can see what is there. But this night the earth was nothing: what was in them and over them was all. Donal felt—as so many will feel, before the earth, like a hen set to hatch the eggs of a soaring bird, shall have done rearing broods for heaven—that, with this essential love and wonder by his side, to be doomed to go on walking to all eternity would be a blissful fate, were the landscape turned to a brick-field, and the sky to persistent gray.
“Wad ye no tak my airm, mem?” he said at length, summoning courage. “I jist fin’ mysel’ like a horse wi’ a reyn brocken, gaein’ by mysel’ throu’ the air this gait.”