“I am perfectly well, so far as I know. I was so cross to Dora to-day! Why shouldn’t I feel happy when everybody else is? I must be wicked, papa.”
Here Connie woke up.
“There now! I’ve waked Connie,” Wynnie resumed. “I’m always doing something I ought not to do. Please go to sleep again, Connie, and take that sin off my poor conscience.”
“What nonsense is Wynnie talking about being wicked?” asked Connie.
“It isn’t nonsense, Connie. You know I am.”
“I know nothing of the sort, Wynnie. If it were me now! And yet I don’t feel wicked.”
“My dear children,” I said, “we must all pray to God for his Spirit, and then we shall feel just as we ought to feel. It is not for anyone to say to himself how he ought to feel at any given moment; still less for one man to say to another how he ought to feel; that is in the former case to do as St. Paul says he had learned to give up doing—to judge our own selves, which ought to be left to God; in the latter case it is to do what our Lord has told us expressly we are not to do—to judge other people. You get your bonnet, Wynnie, and come out with me. I am going to explore a little of this desert island upon which we have been cast away. And you, Connie, just to please Wynnie, must try and go to sleep again.”
Wynnie ran for her bonnet, a little afraid perhaps that I was going to talk seriously to her, but showing no reluctance anyhow to accompany me.
Now I wonder whether it will be better to tell what we saw, or only what we talked about, and give what we saw in the shape in which we reported it to Connie, when we came back into her room, bearing, like the spies who went to search the land, our bunch of grapes, that is, of sweet news of nature, to her who could not go to gather them for herself. I think it will be the best plan to take part of both plans.
When we left the door of the house, we went up the few steps of a stair leading on to the downs, against and amidst, and indeed in, the rocks, buttressing the sea-edge of which our new abode was built. A life for a big-winged angel seemed waiting us upon those downs. The wind still blew from the west, both warm and strong—I mean strength-giving—and the wind was the first thing we were aware of. The ground underfoot was green and soft and springy, and sprinkled all over with the bright flowers, chiefly yellow, that live amidst the short grasses of the downs, the shadows of whose unequal surface were now beginning to be thrown east, for the sun was going seawards. I stood up, stretched out my arms, threw back my shoulders and my head, and filled my chest with a draught of the delicious wind, feeling thereafter like a giant refreshed with wine. Wynnie stood apparently unmoved amidst the life-nectar, thoughtful, and turning her eyes hither and thither.