“How did I behave, darling?” Phyllis demanded of Mrs. Barrimore when they were alone in the drawing-room waiting for the men to join them.
“Beautifully, dear!” said her mentor with enthusiasm.
During the walk to Gissing (Philip, to everyone’s amazement, had elected to walk back to the bungalow!), he pondered over the demure behavior of Phyllis, and was much exercised as to the motive of this transformation.
“She never attempted to flirt once,” he mentally commented. “Perhaps she is learning some common sense at last.”
CHAPTER XX
“SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR!”
In what the Kingdom of Heaven consists there are wide and varied opinions, but it is reserved to those who have retained, or attained, the heart of a little child to see it.
Eweretta Alvin, despite her twenty-one years, had still the heart of a little child. Her up-bringing had something to do with this.
As a small child, under the care of a singularly pure-minded mother, she had dwelt in a simple prairie home, and the miles and miles of landscape stretching out before her childish eyes had filled her with veneration. She had even then, though she could not have expressed it, been awed by the smallness of herself and the stupendous greatness of the Creator. This feeling had been fostered later on in the peaceful convent school at Montreal, where the gentle Sisters of the Sacred Heart had recognized that Eweretta Alvin was an unusually “spiritual” child.
People outside the convent had called Eweretta foolishly optimistic. Whatever happened, she would declare, had good as its ultimate result. Her mother’s death, which had been a great sorrow, had been far less of an anguish than the knowledge of her father’s sin. Of the loss of her mother, she had said: “She is in Heaven and happy.” Of her father, she had said to herself: “God will make him repent. He has a good heart; God will see to it.”
Of the wrong done her by her Uncle Thomas, she told herself: “God permitted it that I might help a man who never had a chance.”