Miss Hamilton's eyes flashed a little impatiently. She did not like the way in which they withdrew themselves when she was with Mr. Southard. But after going a few steps, she glanced back at Aurelia, and the two smiled. At the moment it struck her that there was something new in Miss Lewis's expression, an unusual seriousness and dignity under her sweetness.
The day was sultry, but otherwise perfect, the green as fresh as at spring, the harbor purple and sparkling, and the sky a deep azure, except where a rim of darkness lay piled around the north and west, cloud-peaks and cliffs showing as hard and sharp as if hewn of stone, but illuminated now and then by lightnings that stirred uneasily within them, changing their dense shadows to molten gold, or leaping in dazzling crinkled flashes from point to point. It seemed a gala-day of nature, so wide, so brilliant, so consciously beautiful was everything.
"'Visibly in his garden walketh God!'" quoted Margaret, looking abroad with delight.
"The god Pan, you mean," said the minister, whose little sparkle of gayety seemed to have been suddenly extinguished.
"The Creator pronounced his work good," she said.
"Yes; but we have changed all that," was the reply. "We have put the heart in the wrong place."
"Moses and Molière," thought Miss Hamilton, amused at the juxtaposition; then added aloud, "Christ pointed to the lilies of the field."
"For a moral and a reproof, yes. He made them not a text, but the illustration of a text. This delight in inanimate nature is not harmful if subordinate to the thought of God; otherwise it is a lure. It leads to materialism, or to sentimental religion that is worse than none, since it bars the way to a true piety."
Margaret made no reply. In spite of herself, his remarks depressed her, and cast some faint shadow over the beauty of the scene.