“Get him to declaim it for you.  It begins in the most impressive language about his standing on top of the Rocky Mountains one day and placing his feet upon a solid rock, he saw a tempest gathering in the valley far below.  So he watches the storm—­in his own language, of course—­while all around him is sunshine.  And such should be our aim in life, to plant our feet on the solid rock of—­how provoking!  I can’t remember what the rock was—­anyway, we are to bid those in the valley below to cease their bickerings and come up to the rock—­I think it was Intellectual Greatness—­No!—­Unselfishness—­that’s it.  And the title of the paper was a sermon in itself—­’The Temporal Advantage of the Individual No Norm of Morality.’  Isn’t that a beautiful thought in itself?  Nancy, that chap will waste himself until he has a city parish.”

There was silence for a little time before Aunt Bell asked, as one having returned to baser matters: 

“I wonder if the jacket of my gray suit came back from that clumsy tailor.  I forgot to ask Ellen if an express package came.”

And Nancy, whose look was bent far into the dusk, answered: 

“Oh, I wonder if he will come back!”

BOOK THREE

The Age of Faith

[Illustration]

CHAPTER I

THE PERVERSE BEHAVIOUR OF AN OLD MAN AND A YOUNG MAN

When old Allan Delcher slept with his fathers—­being so found in the big chair, with the worn, leather-bound Bible open in his lap—­the revived but still tender faith of Aunt Bell Hardwick was bitten as by frost.  And this though the Bible had lain open at that psalm in which David is said to describe the corruption of a natural man—­a psalm beginning, “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”

For it straightway appeared that the dead man had in life done a perverse and inexplicable thing, to the bitter amazement of those who had learned to trust him.  On the day after he sent a blasphemous grandson from his door he had called for Squire Cumpston, announcing to the family his intention to make an entirely new will—­a thing for which there seemed to be a certain sad necessity.

When he could no longer be reproached it transpired that he had left “to Allan Delcher Linford, son of one Clayton Linford,” a beggarly pittance of five thousand dollars; and “to my beloved grandson, Bernal Linford, I give, devise and bequeath the residue of my estate, both real and personal.”

Though the husband of her niece wore publicly a look of faith unimpaired, and was thereby an example to her, Aunt Bell declared herself to be once more on the verge of believing that the proofs of an overseeing Providence, all-wise and all-loving, were by no means overwhelming; that they were, indeed, of so frail a validity that she could not wonder at people falling away from the Church.  It was a trying time for