‘And were you disturbed about my doings?’

’I?  O no.  I am never disturbed with what you do to anybody but me.’

Rollo did not choose to pursue that subject.  He plunged into another.

’I should like to explain to you some of my doings; and I must go a roundabout way to do it.  Miss Hazel, do you read the Bible much?’

‘Much?’ she said with a sudden look up.  ’What do you call “much?” ’

He smiled at her.  ‘Are you in the habit of studying it?’

‘As I study other things I do not know?—­Not often.  Sometimes,’ said Wych Hazel, thinking how often she had gone over that same ninety-first Psalm.

‘What is your notion of religion?—­as to what it means?’

She glanced up at him again, almost wondering for a moment if his wits were ‘touched.’  Then seeing his eyes were undoubtedly sane and grave, set her own wits to work.

‘It means,’ she answered slowly after a pause, ’to me, different things in different people.  All sorts of contradictions, I believe!—­In mamma, as they tell of her, it meant everything beautiful, and loving, and loveable, and tender.  And it puts Dr. Maryland away off—­up in the sky, I think.  And it just blinds Prim, so that she cannot comprehend common mortals.  And it seems to open Gyda’s eyes, so that she does understand—­like mamma.  And—­I do not know what it means in you, Mr. Rollo!’

‘You never saw it in me.’

‘No.’

‘Let me give you a lesson to study,’ said he.  ’Something I have been studying lately a good deal.  I must take this minute before we are interrupted.  Have you got a Bible here?’

She sprang up and brought her own from the next room, with a certain quick way as if she were excited; Rollo took it and turned over the leaves, then placed it before her open.

’I have heard you read the Bible once.  Read now those two verses.’

“For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead:  and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.”—­2 Cor. v. 14, 15.

Wych Hazel read the words slowly, softly,—­then look[ed] up at him again.

‘Is that what it means in you?’ she said.

‘What do the words imply, for anybody?’ he said, with his eyes going down into hers as they did sometimes, like as if they would get at the yet unspoken thoughts.  But hers fell again to the book.

‘I suppose, they should mean—­what they say,’ she answered in the same slow fashion.  ’But what that is,—­or at least would be,—­I do not very well know.’

’If One died for me,—­if it is because of his love and death for me that I live at all,—­to whom do I properly belong? myself, or him?’

‘Well, and then?’ she said, passing the question as answered.

‘Then a good many things,’ he said, smiling again.  ’Suppose that he, to whom I belong, has work that he wants done,—­ suppose there are people he wants taken care of and helped,—­if I love him and if I belong to him, what shall I like to do?’