Mrs. Yorke received her unexpected guest with the greatest kindness; Mr. Yorke, with the greatest courtesy. It was one of the pleasantest families in the world to visit. Not easily accessible to everybody, nor quick to form intimacies, whomever they did receive, they made at once at home. There was a charming ease in their company. Your sole reminder that they understood the proprieties of life was the fact that they never sinned against them.
Seated in the midst of the family, who gathered about him, the minister related the adventures of the last twenty-four hours to his smiling auditory. Only two persons present were grave. Edith could perceive nothing ludicrous in the circumstances. It was a most sad and uncomfortable fact that Minister Conway should have got into the mud, she thought; and, as to preaching in the wrong pulpit, that seemed to her a very awful mistake. The other solemn face belonged to little Eugene Cleaveland, five years old, Major Cleaveland's youngest son. The child was a pet of the Yorkes, and always stayed with them when his father was away from home. He had quite adopted them as his relatives. Mr. and Mrs. Yorke were his aunt and uncle. The others were all cousins. Leaning on Clara's lap, quite unmindful of her caressing hand in his hair or on his cheek, he gazed with large, bright black eyes at the minister, drinking in every word, and thinking his own thoughts.
"Isn't your God as good as their God is?" he asked suddenly in the the first pause.
"We have all the same God, my child," the minister replied; and immediately added to the others, "I perceive that we had better change the subject, lest the little ones should be scandalized. I fancy I even read reproof in the eyes of your niece, madam. And, by the way, she looks like some solemn, medieval religious."
"It is odd she should suggest that thought to you," Mrs. Yorke said. "The child is a Catholic. Come, my dear, and show Mr. Griffeth what a pretty prayer-book you have. It was given me by a very lovely and zealous French lady whom I knew in Paris. I thought it would do Edith most good."
Edith approached the minister with hesitation, half-pleased with him, half-doubtful. But while he talked pleasantly to her, glancing over the book without a sign of prejudice, explaining and praising here and there, her doubts were forgotten. What the child instinctively felt was, that the man had no religious convictions; but, her reason being undeveloped, she could not understand what he lacked. When he learned that she was half-Polish, he delighted her by telling how, in the glorious days of Poland, when the nobles heard Mass, they unsheathed their swords at the Gospel, to show that they were ready on the instant to do battle for the faith, and he promised to procure for her a little handful of earth from the sacred soil of Praga. He then repeated and translated for her an anonymous hymn to the Holy Innocents, written in the fourth century, and, at Mrs. Yorke's request, copied it into the prayer-book. It was this:
"Salvete, flores martyrum,
Quos lucis ipso in limine,
Christi insecutor sustulit,
Ceu turbo nascentes rosas.
Vos, prima Christi victima,
Grex immolatorum tener,
Aram ante ipsam, simplices,
Palma et coronis luditis."
Miss Yorke presently excused herself with the smiling announcement that she must prepare the dessert for dinner, and Clara went out to gather flowers for the dinner-table, taking Eugene Cleaveland with her.
They roamed about the edge of the woods, finding wild-roses and violets; they ventured into wet places for the blue flower-de-luce; they gathered long plumes of ferns, and in a dusky cloister where a brook had hidden one of its windings, they found a cardinal-flower lighting the place like a lamp.
Suddenly the little boy cried out, and began to dance about. There was a bug gone away up in his jacket, he declared.