And His Loving arm uphold you,
God be with you till we meet again.”
Every voice in the church joined in this farewell, and then the benediction was slowly said—the old tender, loving, apostolic benediction, and they all streamed forth into the chill purity of the autumn night. They shook hands with him, and he stood among them tall and slight and pale, inexpressibly touched by their kindliness, unexpectedly thrilled by their display of emotion. It was only their religion which moved these people to demonstration.
The last hand clasp was given. The lights in the church were out, and the Lansing party took its way homeward.
Temperance’s face and Mabella’s were both tear-stained. Vashti’s pale beauty shone out of the dusk with lofty quietude in every line.
Sidney looking at her felt he realized what perfection of body and spirit meant.
A new moon was rising in the clear pale sky—the wide fields, tufted here and there with dim blossomed wild asters, lay sweet and calm, awaiting the approach of night as a cradled child awaits its mother’s kiss. Far away the tinkling lights of solitary farm-houses shone, only serving to emphasize the sense of solitude, here and there a tree made a blacker shadow against the more intangible shades of night. There was no sound of twilight birds; no murmur of insect life.
Sidney was passing home through the heart of the silence after a farewell visit to Lanty, who was kept at home nursing a sick horse.
It was the night before Sidney’s departure from the Lansing house. The summer was over and gone. It had heaped the granaries of his heart high with the golden grains of happiness. He walked swiftly on, then suddenly conscious that he was walking upon another surface than the grass, he paused and looked about him. Around him was the tender greenness of the newly springing grain—above him the hunters’ moon curved its silver crescent, very young yet and shapen like a hunter’s horn. A new sweet night was enfolding the earth, gathering the cares of the day beneath its wings, and bringing with it as deep a sense of hopeful peace as fell upon the earth after the transcendent glory of the first day, and here amid these familiar symbols of nature’s tireless beginnings he was conscious of an exalted sense of re-birth. He too was upon the verge of a new era.