“Where did you fetch it?” she said, looking up.
“I took it out of the graveyard, up-river.”
“Why can’t you say you stole it? It’s them Lyndsays’.” As she spoke the dominant idea which she had so long nurtured rose anew into power. “Well, I didn’t think you was that much of a man, Joe.” She felt that he had taken a downward step. “You stole it!” she repeated. “You needn’t be afraid to tell me.”
The words “stole it” disturbed him.
“I stole it!” he repeated, mechanically.
“I don’t like it any the worse for that. What’s that last line? Did you say all of it?”
“That’s what Dory said was to be put under the rest. It made a lot more work; but Dory she said they most allus done it like that.”
“What is it?” said the woman. “I don’t make it out.”
He hesitated a moment. “‘Of such’—that’s it; most clean forgot it: ‘Of such are the kingdom of heaven.’”
As he spoke the drops began to fall. Then an intolerable blaze of orange light flooded the forest with momentary noonday, and, without interval, the thunder, followed by a deluge of rain, and struck hither and thither by the hills, died away reverberant in the distance.