When I became a man I put away childish things.
The next day was the Sabbath. I was twenty-one that day. Marjie and I sang in the choir, and most of the solo work fell to us. Dave Mead was our tenor, and Bess Anderson at the organ sang alto. Dave was away that day. His girl sweetheart up on Red Range was in her last illness then, and Dave was at her bedside. Poor Dave! he left Springvale that Fall, and he never came back. And although he has been honored and courted of women, I have been told that in his luxurious bachelor apartments in Hong Kong there is only one woman's picture, an old-fashioned daguerreotype of a sweet girlish face, in an ebony frame.
Dr. Hemingway always planned the music to suit his own notions. What he asked for we gave. On this Sabbath morning there was no surprise when he announced, "Our tenor being absent, we will omit the anthem, and I shall ask brother Philip and sister Marjory to sing Number 549, 'Oh, for a Closer Walk with God.'"
He smiled benignly upon us. We were accustomed to his way, and we knew everybody in that little congregation. And yet, somehow, a flutter went through the company when we stood up together, as if everybody knew our thoughts. We had stood side by side on Sabbath mornings and had sung from the same book since childhood, with never a thought of embarrassment. It dawned on Springvale that day as a revelation what Marjie meant to me. All the world, including our town, loves a lover, and it was suddenly clear to the town that the tall, broad-shouldered young man who looked down at the sweet-browed little girl-woman beside him as he looked at nobody else, whose hand touched hers as they turned the leaves, and who led her by the arm ever so gently down the steps from the choir seats, was reading for himself
That old fair story
Set round in glory
Wherever life is found.
And Marjie, in spotless white, with her broad-brimmed hat set back from her curl-shaded forehead, the tinted lights from the memorial window which Amos Judson had placed there for his wife, falling like an aureole about her, who could keep from loving her?
"Her an' Phil Baronet's jist made fur one another," Cam Gentry declared to a bunch of town gossips the next day.
"Now'd ye ever see a finer-lookin' couple?" broke in Grandpa Mead. "An' the way they sung that hymn yesterday—well, I just hope they'll repeat it over my remains." And Grandpa began to sing softly in his quavering voice:
Oh, for a closer walk with God,
A cam and heavenli frame,
A light toe shine upon tha road
That leads me toe tha Lamb.
Everybody agreed with Cam except Judson. He was very cross with O'mie that morning. O'mie was clerk and manager for him now, as Judson himself had been for Irving Whately. He rubbed his hands and joined the group, smiling a trifle scornfully.