And now around this cozy home spot Billy wandered deliriously, aimlessly. It was the tolling of the church bell and the smell of the lilacs that recalled to him the significance of the day.
"Why, he was born on Lilac Sunday and he's red-headed just like Her. Gosh—I must a bin born lucky!"
Billy looked once more all about his story-book home and then his eyes strayed away to Petersen's Woods, fairy green and already full of deep shadowed aisles, full of fretted beauty and solemnity. Beyond them lay the creek, a pool of silver draped in misty morning veils.
"Gosh—I wish to God I was religious!" suddenly, contritely murmured Billy Evans. In high heaven the angels, and in Billy's kitchen Grandma Wentworth, overheard and smiled.
When Hank Lolly came up from the livery barn for a late breakfast, his face drawn and eyes full of fear for the man and woman who had been family and home to him, Billy went down the footpath to meet him.
"It's all right, Hank! He's here, red hair and all," Billy informed him in the merest breath of a whisper. Hank wiped his face in limp relief and sat down quite suddenly on the grass beside the path. Instinctively Billy sat down with him.
They said nothing for a time, just looked and looked at the wide blue sky, the green sweet world, tried for perhaps the millionth time to sense Eternity and the what-and-why-and-how of it all and then gave it up and like children accepted the day, the little new life, the whole wonder of it as happy children accept it all, on faith and with untainted joy. It was just good to be there and there was no doubting the perfect May day. So they sat reverently until Billy, looking again at that mass of shimmering greens and into those church-like aisles, said:
"Hank, some one of us had ought to go to church to-day. I wish to God I had kep' up going to Sunday school. Mother got me started but she died before she could get me started in on church. So I never went. It's a terrible thing for a man not to learn religion along with his reading and writing and 'rithmetic. I used to think it was nobody's business whether I had any religion or not after mother died. I knew that where she was she'd understand. But I see now it was a terrible mistake thinking that way and not laying in a supply of religion. A man thinks he owns himself and that certain things are nobody's business, but by-and-by along comes a wife or a red-headed baby and things happen different from what you've ever expected, things that you just got to have religion for, and gosh—what are you going to do then if you ain't got any?"
This terrible situation being beyond the mental powers of Hank, that soul just sat still until Billy puzzled a way out.
"Somebody'd ought to go to church from out this house to-day," went on Billy in a low voice. "Grandma Wentworth can't go on account of Her and It. I can't go because—gosh—I'm so kind of split, my head going one way and my legs another, that as likely as not I'd wind up in the blacksmith shop or the hotel or fall in the creek. I ain't safe on the streets to-day, Hank. And, anyway, I've got to keep up fires and water boiling and them dumb'd frogs under the willows from croaking so's She can sleep to-night. That leaves nobody but you, Hank."