“But is your congregation always so small?” she asked.
“That was about the average on Sunday,” he answered, and added, with a sigh, as if the fact were one he tried to forget, “It is small. My predecessor, I’m afraid, was unpopular, and latterly very old and feeble, and could not keep them together. A few have come back to me, but only a few.”
“Then why do you stay here?” said Lily, impetuously. “Robert told me about your books, and—and the house—the Manse—so poor and bare. He says you must be far above your work. Indeed, we knew it from your sermon on Sunday.”
He looked distressed.
“Do you think they will not have understood me?” he asked, with eager anxiety. “Was it difficult—obscure—beyond the mark?”
“Oh, no, no!” said Lily, astonished at his way of looking at it; “a child must have understood every word. I can’t quite explain how it struck me and Robert too; it was so short and so complete, and the words so simple that one wondered at their intense force; and yet—yet—”
He looked anxiously at her. “Don’t be afraid to find fault, Miss Echalaz,” he said, earnestly; “I shall be so thankful to you—”
“Fault!” she interrupted; “oh, you don’t understand me! I never heard anything that went so straight from heart to heart as those words of yours. When we came out I turned to Robert, and he turned to me, and we both said, ‘Well?’ and then Robert asked me what was the secret of such power, but I couldn’t tell. And he thought a long time as we went home, about what you had said, and what he would have said in your place, which none of them would have listened to or understood.”
Lily smiled rather sadly and broke off, for she remembered how Robert had said to her at last that Macpherson “walked with God,” and that that was the secret of his power. She could not well repeat her brother’s words, but she knew that they were true, and wanted to acknowledge to Macpherson the debt that both felt they owed to him.
“Ah! Mr. Macpherson,” she said, earnestly, “you made us both ashamed. We were eager to begin teaching, and we suddenly found we had everything still to learn. Robert says he sees now that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be done by a man who has not begun with himself.”