"Can't he visit some of our Suez friends—Mary and Martha Salter, Doctor Coffin, or Parson Tombs, the Sextons, or Clay Mattox? I'm not puritanical, nor are they. He's sure of a welcome from either Cousin Hamlet Graves or his brother Lazarus. Heaven has spared us a few friends still."
"Oh, yes, indeed. Dead loads of them; if son would only take to them. And, Daphne, deah,"—the husband brightened—"I hope, yet, he will."
School terms came and went. Mrs. March attributed her son's failure to inherit literary talent to his too long association with his father. He stood neither first, second, nor last in anything. In spiritual conditions he was not always sure that he stood at all. At times he was shaken even in the belief that the love of fun is the root of all virtue, and although he called many a droll doing a prank which the law's dark lexicon terms a misdemeanor, for weeks afterward there would be a sound in his father's gentle speech as of that voice from which Adam once, in the cool of the day, hid himself. In church the sermons he sat under dwelt mainly on the technical difficulties involved in a sinner's salvation, and neither helped nor harmed him; he never heard them. One clear voice in the midst of the singing was all that engaged his ear, and when it carolled, "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass," the notes themselves were to him the cooling shower.
One Sabbath afternoon, after a specially indigestible sermon which Sister Usher said enthusiastically to Major Garnet ought to be followed by a great awakening—as, in fact, it had been—Barbara, slim, straight, and fifteen, softly asked her mother to linger behind the parting congregation for Fannie. As Miss Halliday joined them John, from the other aisle, bowed so pathetically to his Sunday-school teacher that when she turned again to smile on Barbara and her mother she laughed, quite against her will. The mother and daughter remained grave.
"Fannie," said Mrs. Garnet, her hand stealing into the girl's, "I'm troubled about that boy." Barbara walked ahead pretending not to hear, but listening hard.
"Law! Cousin Rose, so'm I! I wish he'd get religion or something. Don't look so at me, Cousin Rose, you make me smile. I'm really trying to help him, but the more I try the worse I fail. If I should meet him on the straight road to ruin I shouldn't know what to say to him; I'm a pagan myself."
XVII.
THE ROSEMONT ATMOSPHERE
About this time Barbara came into new surroundings. She had been wondering for a month what matter of disagreement her father and mother were trying to be very secret about, when one morning at breakfast her father said, while her mother looked out the window: