“We woke up the kennel man,” laughed Gail, turning, with a sparkling glance, to Allison, who was being introduced ceremoniously to the ladies by Uncle Jim. “We had a perfectly glorious evening! We dined at Roseleaf Inn, entirely surrounded by hectic lights, then we drove five miles into the country and bought Flakes. We came home so fast that Mr. Allison almost had to hold me in.” She turned, laughing, to find the eyes of the Reverend Smith Boyd fixed on her in cold disapproval. They were no longer blue!
CHAPTER IV
TOO MANY MEN
“A conscience must be a nuisance to a rector,” sympathised Gail Sargent, as she walked up the hill beside the Reverend Smith Boyd.
The tall, young rector shifted the thin rope of the sled to his other hand.
“Epigrams are usually more clever than true,” he finally responded, with a twinkle in his eyes. It had been in his mind to sharply defend that charge, but he reflected that it was unwise to assume the speech worth serious consideration. Moreover, he had come to this toboggan party for healthful physical exercise!
“Then you’re guilty of an epigram,” retorted Gail, who was annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd without quite knowing why. “You can’t believe all you are compelled, as a minister, to say.”
“That,” returned the Reverend Smith Boyd coldly, “is a matter of interpretation.” He commended himself for his patience, as he proceeded to instruct this mistaken young person. She was a lovable girl, in spite of the many things he found in her of which to disapprove. “The eye of the needle through which the camel was supposed not to be able to pass, was, in reality, a narrow city gate called the Needle’s Eye.”
Gail looked at him with that little smile at the corners of her red lips, eyelids down, curved lashes on her cheeks, and beneath the lashes a sparkle brighter than the moonlight on the snow crystals in the adjoining field.
“It seems to me there was something about wealth in that metaphor,” she observed, her round eyes flashing open as she smiled up at him. “If it was so difficult even in those days for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, how can a rich church hope to enter the spirit of the gospel?”
The Reverend Smith Boyd hastily, and almost roughly, drew her aside, as a long, low bob-sled, accompanied by appropriate screams, came streaking down the hill, and passed them. They both turned and followed its progress down the narrowing white road, to where it curved away in a silver line far at the bottom of a hill. Hills and valleys, and fences and trees, and even a distant stream were covered with the fleecy mantle of winter, while high over head in a sky of blue, hung a round, white moon, which flooded the country-side with mellow light, and strewed upon earth’s fresh robe a wealth of countless sparkling gems.