Yet the ascetic life was not devoid of compensation—­particularly when Milo Barrus, the village atheist, was pointed out to him among the care-free Sabbath loafers.

Clytie predicted most direly interesting things of him if he did not come to the Feet before he died.  “But I believe he will come to the Feet,” she added, “even if it’s on his very death-bed, with the cold sweat standing on his brow.  It would make a lovely tract—­him coming to the Feet at the very last moment and his face lighting up and everything.”

The little boy, however, rather hoped Milo Barrus wouldn’t come to the Feet.  It was more worth while going to Heaven if he didn’t, and if you could look down and see him after it was too late for him to come.  During church that morning he chiefly wondered about the Feet.  Once, long ago, it seemed, he had been with his dear father in a very big city, and out of the maze of all its tangled marvels of sound and sight he had brought and made his own forever one image:  the image of a mighty foot carved in marble, set on a pedestal at the bottom of a dark stairway.  It had been severed at the ankle, and around the top was modestly chiselled a border of lace.  It was a foot larger than his whole body, and he had passed eager, questioning hands over its whole surface, pressing it from heel to each perfect toe.  Of course, this must be one of the Feet to which Milo Barrus might come; he wondered if the other would be up that dark stairway, and if Milo Barrus would go up to look for it—­and what did you have to do when you got to the Feet?  The possibility of not getting to them, or of finding only one of them, began to fill his inner life quite as the sombre shadows filled and made a presence of themselves in the Front Room—­particularly of a Sabbath, when one must be uncommonly good because God seemed to take more notice than on week-days.

During the week, indeed, Clytie often relaxed her austerity.  She would even read to him verses of her own composition, of which he never tired and of which he learned to repeat not a few.  One of her pastoral poems told of a visit she had once made to the home of a relative in a neighbouring State.  It began thus: 

  “New Hampshire is a pretty place,
  I did go there to see
  The maple-sugar being boiled
  By one that’s dear to me.”

Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza—­

  “I loved to hear the banjo hum,
  It sounds so very calmly;
  If a happy home you wish to find,
  Visit the Thompson family.”

After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her voice—­

  “At lovers’ promises fates grow merrilee;
  Some are made on land,
  Some on the deep sea. 
  Love does sometimes leave
    Streams of tears.”