“But you worship a woman—images of a woman.”
“Ah, that’s rather different. I don’t think we’ll discuss that, because, you see, we look at everything from rather different points of view. How’s that poor foot of yours? You’re a regular Spartan to bear pain. Am I carrying you comfortably?”
Here was another facer for Maggie; he did not want “to discuss that.”
“I thought,” she said, “that you liked to burn everybody wha’ didna ’gree wi’ you—when ye got the chance,” she added.
“Oh, we’re not quite so black as we’re painted, and the world is big enough for us all nowadays, even though there are so many more people in it. Isn’t that a good thing?”
Maggie’s honest little heart yearned over this mistaken man, who carried little girls so tenderly, who seemed so kind and gay.
“I wish that you were no a papish,” she said softly, “for I’m sorely afraid that ye’ll no win Heaven if you worship graven images.”
The papist in question stopped short in the middle of the woodland path. The sunlight shining through the leaves painted fantastic patterns on his white draperies, and his eyes were very kind as he said gently:
“Don’t you think there will be even more room in Heaven than there is here for all sorts of people, provided they are kind, and brave, and honest, and do their best?”
And Maggie agreed that it might be possible, and was something comforted. By and by he asked her what the nice song was that she had been singing when he first met her, and she sang it again for him all through, till he, too, learned the tune; then she taught him the words, and although his Scotch left much to be desired, they made a very considerable noise between them, and the woods resounded to the strains of “Dance, Kitty Bairdie.”