The following day was Sunday, the fourth they had spent on Lost Island. The nearest church was two and a half miles around the bay shore road, at Eastport, but services were held in the open air stadium in the pine grove back of the hotel. The cottagers and shore people attended here, and the girls had been glad to go also. They tried to persuade Aunty Welcome to accompany them, but she steadfastly refused to budge along that bay shore road until she left for good.
“I’se hyar, and I knows I’se hyar, and I ain’t a-going to trust myself to any quagmires and pitfalls along any ole shore road till I has to,” she declared.
“Let’s stop for the Captain and the rest,” Polly said, as they came to the quiet cottage at Fair Havens, but it was locked, so they went on. The Captain usually took the big carry-all and drove over to the village church. There he could sit, and look out of the window beside his pew, straight into the little graveyard, where rows and rows of Carey headstones bade him be of good cheer, for the harbor was sure, and the Pilot faithful to His promise.
But the girls loved the open air service up in the pines. The stadium had been erected for lectures and Chautauqua meetings during the summer months, and was beautifully situated on Lookout Hill. On one side it commanded a fine view over the Sickle, clear out to where the old Atlantic rolled in in long, dark green combers. Behind it were climbing aisles of eternal green, depths of sweet-scented thicket, patches of wild flowers, and above all the towering pines, with their incessant murmur as though they were answering their big brother, the sea.
The stadium was a great wooden amphitheater, built roughly but strongly, and roofed to protect its audiences against sudden summer showers. The second Sunday the girls had gone, there had been a thunder storm, and it had seemed so strange to watch the trees lashed and torn by the tempest, while they sat under cover safe as could be.
“I never was so near a storm, and yet out of it,” Sue had declared. “Why, you could have reached out, and patted the wind on the back, and it couldn’t have hurt you.”
After service they walked slowly down the winding, rustic walk that led to the shore.
“It seems to me, girls, that the service sounds ever so much more solemn here than it does in a church,” Isabel was saying. “It seems so much nearer heaven here in the woods.”
“But it’s not, really,” Kate put in, briskly. “That’s only an idea that people have, and I think it’s wrong. Supposing God dwelt only in the high places, what would become of those who sit in darkness, and the shadow of death?”
Polly was looking out to sea, her brown eyes thoughtful, and a bit sad. She didn’t know why she felt sad, but she did, and only the Captain seemed to understand why. He had said once over at the island that a barometer probably had no idea what ailed it, but it ailed just the same, and Polly’s temperament was just as volatile.