“O, you must not talk so, Dan! I do so wish you could see religion as it really is.”
“Fiddlesticks!” said Dan. “If I must be a spoon, I prefer to be made so by a live woman, not a morbid longing to twang a golden harp.”
“Your father does not talk like that,” replied Susie, who was always timid before Dan’s outbursts of humor, but the belief that she was in the right made her bold. “I know he will not go to church, but he is so good! and he never says anything against others going, if they find spiritual food in what he says are dry husks to him.”
“He’s a fine old chap, no mistake about that, and he forgets more every day than most people ever know; but he’s soft in spots. If I had only known him when he was a young man, I should have helped him to cut his eye-teeth.”
“Ah!” said Susie, “what you call his ‘soft spots’ are his noblest qualities. What can be more benevolent and sweet than his treatment of poor old Mrs. Buzzell?”
“Is that a conundrum?” Dan asked, in his rollicking way.
“He is so good!” said Susie, taking no notice of Dan’s levity; “and I often think if he would join the church it would influence you——”
“No, it wouldn’t,” interrupted Dan. “I’m only sensitive to your influence. You could do anything with me if you loved me as you once did.” They had just entered the gate and stopped a moment under the lilacs by the path. Susie looked up into Dan’s face and said, with a voice that trembled, “It is cruel for you to doubt me. I have not changed, unless”—“to love you more,” she would have said, but her words were checked by the depth of her emotion.
“You do not show it, then.”
“O Dan! I pray for you always. I think of you every moment. How can I prove it better?” she asked, with despairing tenderness.