"The effect of your favorites upon you to-day has not been particularly reassuring," said Bryant, more stirred by Margaret's tone and manner than by her words. Seeing that he had angered her, and trying to stem the tide of her indignation, he still blundered most flagrantly, and within a half hour the quarrel had culminated in an avowed separation for the rest of their lives, Bryant leaving the house in a state of indignant misery such as fond and over-confident lovers alone may know.
Not a word had been said, this time, about the "blue-mouldy" girl. The atmosphere had been too electric, the mood too tense for a laughing word.
Then followed silence between these two. Stubborn pride on the part of the woman, proud stubbornness on the part of the man. They were earnestly and faithfully in love, but each waited to hear the first word of forgiveness.
Bryant did write, but in his preoccupation left his letter upon the desk unposted, and in a day it was snowed under by his unopened or carelessly glanced at mail. Of course he misunderstood Miss Selwyn's silence and she resented his.
One Sunday morning Margaret, with an innate grasping and running back to the faith in which she had been bred, sought help at the source which best suited her—the relief which comes from religion.
It so chances that there is a shrine upon the bank of the Ganges. It so chances that there is what we call a Mecca. It so chances that we all occasionally seek our shrines.
Margaret Selwyn sat in her shrine, the outgrown old Episcopal Cathedral on Washington Boulevard, and listened to her pastor, one of the great old men who have grown up with a creed, but with thought and lovingness; one who has learned how to heal wounds, the wounds of which no tongue can tell, and how to advise genially and generally as to the affairs of life. Somehow, the old gentleman, with his white hair and robes, his simple, clean, old-fashioned honesty, had imparted to her a strength and faith in God which calmed and helped her. It may be there could not have been imparted to her by any one else in the world, politics and power and inherited splendor all considered, as much as could this plain old man.
The white-robed boys sang their recessional, and she became perhaps clearer and more comprehensive of mind than before she entered the church—certainly more equipoised than she had been for days.
Meditatively alive to the quiet of this Sunday noon, Miss Margaret Selwyn, as she neared the centre of the city, stopped short and looked about her. Where was she?
The pavement of the street was gray-blue, spotted with white, and gleaming here and there with the iridescent living tints of bird plumage. The air was winged by soft forms, and a crowd of idlers were scattering grains of corn upon the ground to lure and keep in sight the most graceful creatures that live between the sky and earth.