It was done.  He had time now to stretch his nerves of body and soul with a great sigh of relief,—­to see that Duty was, after all, a lean, meagre-faced angel, that Christ sends first, but never meant should be nearest and best.  Faith, love, and so, happiness, these were words of more pregnant meaning in the gospel the Helper left us.  So McKinstry stood straight up, for the first time in his life, and looked about him.  A man, with an adult’s blood, muscles, needs; an idle soul which his cramped creed did not fill, hungry domestic instincts, narrow and patient habit;—­he claimed work and happiness, his right.  Of course it came, and tangibly.  Into every life God sends an actual messenger to widen and lift it above itself:  puerile or selfish the messenger often is, but so straight from Him that the divine radiance clings about it, and all that it touches.  We call that love, you remember.  A secular affair, according to McKinstry’s education, as much as marketing.  So when he found that the tawny old house and the quiet little girl in there with the curious voice, which people came for miles to hear, were gaining an undue weight in his life, held, to be plain, all the fairy-land of which his childhood had been cheated, all fierce beauty, aspiration, passionate strength to insult Fate, which his life had never known, he kept the knowledge to himself.  It was boyish weakness.  He choked it out of thought on Sundays as sacrilege:  how could he talk of the Gurney house and Lizzy to that almighty, infinite Vagueness he worshipped?  Stalking to and fro, in the outskirts of the churchyard, he used to watch the flutter of the little girl’s white dress, as she passed by to “meeting.”  He could not help it that his great limbs trembled, if the dress touched them, or that he had a mad longing to catch the tired-looking child up to his brawny breast and hold her there forever.  But he felt guilty and ashamed that it was so; not knowing that Christ, seeing the pure thrill in his heart, smiled just as he did long ago when Mary brought the beloved disciple to him.

He never had told little Lizzy that he loved her,—­hardly told himself.  Why, he was forty-five,—­and a year or two ago she was sledding down the street with her brothers, a mere yellow-haired baby.  He remembered the first time he had noticed her,—­one Christmas eve; his mother and Sarah were alive then.  There was an Italian woman came to the village with a broken hand-organ, a filthy, starving wretch, and Gurney’s little girl went with her from house to house in the snow, singing Christmas carols, and handing the tambourine.  Everybody said, “Why, you little tot!” and gave her handfuls of silver.  Such a wonderful voice she had even then, and looked so chubby and pretty in her little blue cloak and hood; and going about with the woman was such a pure-hearted thing to do.  She danced once or twice that day, striking the tambourine, he remembered; the sound of it seemed to put her in a sort of ecstasy, laughing