The side-door with a step beneath a little penthouse roof led direct into the rectory study. She tapped at this door and entering, hurried across the room to the elderly little clerical figure in the chair beside the cluttered table. Dropping on the footstool beside this chair, she put her hands, both, into the parchment brown ones outstretched to greet her.
The study, with its book-lined walls, its cluttered table, its cluttered open desk, its smoldering grate fire, reeked with tobacco. The scholarly little person in clerical garb in the leather chair seemed mellowed to meerschaum tints with it, from the ivory tones of his close, small beard, to the parchment brown of those shapely old hands grasping hers, while their owner looked in kindly fashion down into her face lifted to his.
The volume he had laid down at her entrance, was of a Hebrew character. Report had it that he was equally at home in at least three other tongues as erudite. He had baptized Selina, a wee baby in flowing robes, and fourteen years later had prepared her for her confirmation. From the pulpit he had talked to her nearly every Sunday of her life since babyhood. His wife was fond of her; he was fond of her. In their ways he and this pretty girl were very good friends. And yet in reality he knew nothing whatever about her.
"Selina, my child? And what then, my dear?"
"A great deal, Dr. Ronald. Mamma feels that I ought to be in all sorts of things connected with the church now, the Rector's Aid, and the Altar Guild, and such things. And that I ought to take a Sunday-school class. She's said so much about it, she's stopped now, and only looks her hurt and disappointment, that I don't do it." She paused. The fine old brown hand went on patting hers. Its owner's eyes went on studying her face not unshrewdly.
"And Auntie comes to industrial school every Saturday morning, and every Saturday morning looks disappointed when I decline her invitation to come with her."
"And why decline it, my dear? That at least is a little thing to do, to please her?"
Selina burst forth. "I'm through with doing things because it pleases somebody. I've done it all—church, confirmation, communion—because they told me to. I've never had a conviction in my life. Tell them for me, please, Dr. Ronald—that's what I've come to you for—tell them that I've a right to find the ways for myself. Tell them, that because I haven't found any of them for myself, it's all perfunctory, and all cut and dried. That I hate the coming, that I hate it when I'm here, hunting God in my Sunday clothes in congregations, and I hate God, too, if he's what they all seem to make him."
She sobbed, and her head slipped onto his knee, face down as she sobbed. The wrinkled brown hand merely moved itself to the masses of her hair and went on patting.
"My dear, my dear," the old rector said, "I'm surprised, I'm truly distressed. You are young, overyoung and impatient and heady. And you imagine these things you feel to-day are final. As for your mother, Selina, and your good aunt, salt of the earth they are, never overlook that fact, salt of the earth. While on the other hand, these things you are confessing to are traits common to all youth rather than peculiar to you. How many dare I estimate in my forty years' pastorate in this church, have come to me in this room as you to-day, each with youth's cry against the claim of things upon him?"