The rector of the richest church in the world flushed a trifle, and looked at the barley in the bottom of his soup. His mother regarded him quietly, and the twinkles went out of her eyes. She had been bound to get at the bottom of his irritability, and now she had arrived at it.
“I would prefer not to go,” he told her stiffly, and the eyes which he lifted to her were coldly green.
“Why?”
Again that slight twitch of impatience in his brows, then he suppressed a sigh. The catechism was on the way, and he might just as well answer up promptly.
“I do not approve of Miss Sargent.”
For just one second the rector’s mother felt an impulse to shake Tod Boyd. Gail Sargent was a young lady of whom any young man might approve—and what was the matter with Tod? She was beginning to be humiliated by the fact that, at thirty-two, he had not lost his head and made a fool of himself, to the point of tight shoes and poetry, over a girl.
“Why?” and the voice of Mrs. Boyd was not cold as she had meant it to be. She had suddenly felt some tug of sympathy for Tod.
“Well, for one thing, she has a most disagreeable lack of reverence,” he stated.
“Reverence?” and Mrs. Boyd knitted her brows. “I don’t believe you quite understand her. She has the most beautifully simple religious faith that I have ever seen, Tod.”
The Reverend Smith Boyd watched his soup disappearing, as if it were some curious moving object to which his attention had just been called.