“I suppose it must,” she had replied, “until he learns how God forgives.”
In her next letter to Tessa, Mrs. Towne had written, “Do you know how God forgives?” and Tessa had replied, “You and I seem to be thinking the same thought nowadays, and nowanights, for last night it came to me that loving enough to forgive is the love that makes Him so happy.”
This letter was the only one of all written that winter that Mrs. Towne showed to her son. It was not returned to her. Months afterward he showed it to Tessa, saying that that thought was more to him than all the sermons to which he had ever listened. “Because you didn’t know how to listen,” she answered saucily, adding in a reverent tone, “I did not understand it until I lived it.”
The letter had been written with burning cheeks; if he might read it, she would be glad; it would reveal something that she did not dare tell him herself; but she had no hope that he would see it.
“Tessa is not so bright as she was,” observed Miss Sarepta’s mother, “she’s more settled down; I guess that she has found out what she means; it takes a deal of time for young women to do that.”
XXIV.—SHUT IN.
It was a trial to Sarepta Towne that the sun did not rise and set in the west, for in that case her bay window would have been perfect.
Dinah had named this window “summer time:” on each side ivy was climbing in profusion; on the right side stood a fuchsia six feet in height; opposite this an oleander was bursting into bloom; a rose geranium and a pot of sweet clover were placed on brackets and were Tessa’s special favorites; one hanging basket from which trailed Wandering Jew was filled with oxalis in bloom, another was but a mass of graceful and shining greens.
In the centre of the window on a low table stood a Ward’s case; into this Dinah had never grown tired of looking; Professor Towne had constructed it on his last visit at home, and one of the pleasures of it to Miss Sarepta had consisted in the talks they had while planning it together. Among its ferns, mosses, berries, and trailing arbutus they had formed a grotto of shells and bits of rocks; the floor was bits of looking-glass; tufts of eye-bright were mingled with the mosses and were now in bloom, and Miss Sarepta was sure that the trailing arbutus would flower before Tessa could bring it home to her from the woods.
“This room is full of Philip and Cousin Ralph,” Sarepta had said; “his picture is but one of the things in it and in this house to remind me of Cousin Ralph.”