The little man had replaced the broken trace, and the ponies, fretting with the cold and eager to get home, took hungrily to the trail.
But the Bishop forgot to practise his French further upon Arsene. He told him briefly what had happened, then lapsed into silence.
Now the Bishop remembered what Tom Lansing had said about the girl. She knew more now than he did. Not more than Tom Lansing knew now. But more than Tom Lansing had known half an hour ago.
She would want to see the world. She would want to know life and ask her own questions from life and the world. In the broad open space between her eye-brows it was written that she would never take anybody’s word for the puzzles of the world. She was marked a seeker; one of those 25 who look unafraid into the face of life, and demand to know what it means. They never find out. But, heart break or sparrow fall, they must go on ever and ever seeking truth in their own way. The world is infinitely the better through them. But their own way is hard and lonely.
She must go out. She must have education. She must have a chance to face life and wrest its lessons from it in her own way. It did not promise happiness for her. But she could go no other way. For hers was the high, stony way of those who demand more than jealous life is ready to give.
The Bishop only knew that he had this night given a promise which had sent a man contentedly on his way. Somehow, God would show him how best to keep that promise.
And when they halloed at Father Ponfret’s house in French Village he had gotten no farther than that.
Tom Lansing lay in dignified state upon his couch. Clean white sheets had been draped over the skins of the couch. The afternoon sun looking in through the west window picked out every bare thread of his service coat and glinted on the polished brass buttons. His bayonet was slung into the belt at his side.
Ruth Lansing sat mute in her grief at the head of the couch, listening to the comments and 26 stumbling condolences of neighbours from the high hills and the lower valleys. They were good, kindly people, she knew. But why, why, must every one of them repeat that clumsy, monotonous lie–– How natural he looked!
He did not. He did not. He did not look natural. How could her Daddy Tom look natural, when he lay there all still and cold, and would not speak to his Ruth!