The dark eyes smiled into his face.
“You may go with me, Morris.”
He took up his cane and coat.
“I’ll grudge the minutes I can’t talk, but I’ll sit and look at you. You are growing more beautiful every day, Ruth. I am grateful for the honour you are going to do me in attending the inauguration. I’ll agree to anything you say to-day.”
They slipped into a seat under the gallery unobserved. The new usher did not recognise either Ruth or her distinguished escort.
The services moved her with a strange power. In every hymn she heard the deep rich voice of Gordon as she had seen him so often stand in that pulpit. The swell of the organ’s full notes throbbed with his memory. The man she heard was no longer the new pastor, but her beloved, and she was living over again the sweet days of the past when he was her own and she had filled his life.
The preacher was reading the most beautiful psalm in the language of man: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.”
A strange peace came over her as the music of these grand old sentences, throbbing with the passionate faith of centuries, swept her heart.
He was reading from the old Bible that rested on the same golden lectern pulpit Gordon had hurled behind him that awful day in their history. The same crimson cloth he had twisted into a shapeless mass and thrown aside once more hung from its front. She could see a ragged break in the gold of the cross where his enormous hand had crushed it that day.
The thought of God’s eternal life and unchanging purpose, binding all time within His mighty plan, soothed her spirit. Men might come and go behind that pulpit and from its pews, but the Church of God, symbol of the eternal, would go on forever. In the deep rhythm of the psalm to which she listened she felt the heart-beat of its continuous unbroken life stretching back to creation’s dawn and on until Time shall roll into the ocean of Eternity.