“Yes, I ’ll be delighted to see you. Good-night.”
Gaston was the last to return to Hambright. He walked the two miles through the silent starlit woods. He took a short cut his bare feet had travelled as a boy, and with uncovered head walked slowly through the dim aisles of great trees. It was good, this cool silence and the soft mantle of the night about his soul! The stars whispered love. The wind sighed it through the leaves.
He had withdrawn from the church in his college days because he had grown to doubt everything—God, heaven, hell, and immortality. To-night as he walked slowly home he heard that wonderful sentence of the old Bible ringing down the ages, wet with tears and winged with hope, “God is love!”
He said it now softly and reverently, and the tears came unbidden from his soul. He felt close to the heart of things. He knew he was close to the heart of nature. What if nature was only another name for God? And he whispered it again, “God is love!”
“Ah! If I only knew it I would bow down and worship Him forever!” he cried.
When Sallie reached her mother’s room that night, Mrs. Worth was seated by her window.
“Why didn’t you dance?”
“Didn’t care to.”
“Sly Miss, you can’t fool me. You didn’t dance because Mr. Gaston couldn’t. That was a dangerously loud way to talk to him.”
“How did you like him, Mama?”