He smiled and walked on, but added airily to Orion: 

“When I come again—­you know—­I shall be pleased if my eye is no longer offended by these mementos of an extinct idolatry.”

“Truth and justice!” replied Orion in a constrained voice.  “They have dwelt on this spot and ruled in this house for nearly five hundred years.”

“It would look better, and be more suitable,” retorted the patriarch, “if you could say that of Him to whom alone the place of honor is due in a Christian house; in His presence every virtue flourishes of itself.  The Christian should proscribe every image from his dwelling; at the door of his heart only should he raise an image on the one hand of Faith and on the other of Humility.”

By this time they had reached the court-yard, where Susannah’s chariot was waiting.  Orion helped the prelate into it, and when Benjamin offered him his hand to kiss, in the presence of several hundred slaves and servants, all on their knees, the young man lightly touched it with his lips.  He stood bowed low in reverence so long as the holy father remained visible, in the attitude of blessing the crowd from the open side of the chariot; then he hurried away to join his mother.

He expected to find her exhausted by the excitement of the patriarch’s visit; but, in fact, she was more composed than he had seen her yet since his father’s death.  Her eyes indeed, commonly so sober in their expression, were bright with a kind of rapture which puzzled Orion.  Had she been thinking of his father?  Could the patriarch have succeeded in inspiring her pious fervor to such a pitch, that it had carried her, so to speak, out of herself?

She was dressed to go to church, and after expressing her delight at the honor done to herself and her whole household by the prelate’s visit, she invited Orion to accompany her.  Though he had proposed devoting the next few hours to a different purpose, the dutiful son at once acceded to this wish; he helped her into her chariot, bid the driver go slowly, and seated himself by her side.

As they drove along he asked her what she had told the patriarch, and her replies might have reassured him but that she filled him with grave anxiety on fresh grounds.  Her mind seemed to have suffered under the stress of grief.  It was usually so clear, so judicious, so reasonable; and now all she said was incoherent and not more than half intelligible.  Still, one thing he distinctly understood:  that she had not confided to the patriarch the fact of his father’s curse.  The prelate must certainly have censured the conduct of the deceased to her also and that had sealed her lips.  She complained to her son that Benjamin had never understood her lost husband, and that she had felt compelled to repress her desire to disclose everything to him.  Nowhere but in church, in the very presence of the Redeemer, could she bring herself to allow him to read her heart as it were an open book.  A voice had warned her