"Well, Sunbeam, it has been a bright day for every raspberry girl that has come in your way. What else did you see there."—"I saw the church."
"Not the invisible" said Mr. Linden, smiling, "remember that."
"Invisible! no," said Faith. "There was a great deal of this visible."
"What thoughts did it put in your head?"—"It was very—wonderfully beautiful," said Faith, thoughtfully.
"What else?"—"I cannot tell. You would laugh at me if I could. Endecott, it didn't seem so much like a church to me as the little white church at home."
"I agree with you there—the less show of the instrument the sweeter the music, to me. But the street in front of the church, so specially filled with beggars and cripples, I never go by there, Faith, without a feeling of joy; remembering the blind man who sat at the Beautiful gate of the temple; knowing well that there is as 'safe, expeditious, and easy a way' to heaven from that dusty side-walk, as from any other spot of earth. The triumph of grace!—how glorious it is! I cannot speak to all of them together, nor even one by one, but grace is free! 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.' Faith, I have been thinking of that all day!"
She could see it in his face—in the flush on the cheek and the flash in the eye as he came and stood before her. She could see what had been all day before his eyes and mind; and how pain and sympathy and longing desire had laid hold of the promise and rested there—"Ask and ye shall receive." Unconsciously Faith folded her hands, and the least touch of a smile in the corners of her mouth was in no wise contradictory of her eyes' sweet gravity.
"I saw them too," she said, in a low tone. "Endecott, I would rather speak to them out there, under the open sky, if it wasn't a crowd—than in the church?"
"I should forget where I was, after I began to speak," said Mr. Linden; "though I do love 'that dome—most catholic and solemn,' better than all others."
"Mr. Pulteney asked me how I liked the church," said Faith.