helplessly, and finally went out into the moon light, and hunted up an old box which he brushed off with the broom and brought inside, where he clumsily spread out the blue and white frills over its splintery top, and then solemnly tried to stick a pin into the cushion, fumbling in the lapel of his coat for one.
He was growing more and more bewildered with his new possessions, and as each came to light he began to wonder how he was going to be able to entertain and keep up to such a lot of fineries.
Mother Winship had put in a gay knit afghan which looked well over the couch, and next came a layer of Sunday-school singing-books, a Bible, and some lesson leaves. A card said that Esther Wakefield had sent these and she hoped they would be a help in the new Sunday-school.
The followed a roll of blackboard doth, a large cloth map of Palestine, and a box of chalk; and the young man grew more and more helpless. This was worse than the bureau set and the slippers. What was he to do with them all? He start a Sunday-school! He would be much more likely to start children in the opposite way from heaven if he went on as he had been going the last two years.
His face hardened, and he was almost ready to sweep the whole lot back into the box, nail them up, and send them back where they came from. What did he want of a lot of trash with a set of such burdensome obligations attached?"
But curiosity made him go back to see what there was left in the box, and a glance around his room made him unwilling to give up all this luxury.
He looked curiously at the box of fluffy lace things with Marion Halstead's card lying atop. He could only guess that they were some girl's fixings, and he wondered vaguely what he should do with them. Then he unwrapped a photograph of the six girls which had been hurriedly taken and was inscribed, "Guess which is which," with a list of their names written on a circle of paper like spokes to a wheel.
He studied each face with interest, and somehow it was for the writer of the letter that he sought, Hazel Winship. And he thought he should know her at once.
This was going to be very interesting. It would while away some of the long hours when there was nothing worthwhile to do, and keep him from thinking how long it took orange groves to pay, and what hard luck he had always had.
He decided at first glance that the one in the centre with the clear eyes and firm, sweet mouth was the instigator of all this bounty; and, as his eyes travelled from one face to another and came back to hers each time, he felt more sure of it. There was something frank and pleasant in her gaze. Somehow it would not do to send that girl back her things and tell her he was in no need of her charity. He liked to think she had thought of him, even though she did think of him as a poor discouraged girl or an old mammy.
He stood the picture up against the lace of the pincushion, and forever gave up the idea of trying to send those things back.
There seemed to be one thing more in the bottom of the box, and it was fastened inside another protecting board. He took it at last from its wrappings—a large picture, Hermann's head of Christ, framed in broad dark Flemish oak to match the tint of the etching.
Dimly he understood who was the subject of the picture, although he had never seen it before. Silently he found a nail and drove it deep into the log of the wall. Just over the organ he hung it, without the slightest hesitation. He had recognized at once where this picture belonged, and knew that it, and not the bright rug, nor the restful couch, nor the gilded screen, nor even the organ itself, was to set the standard henceforth for his home and his life.
He knew this all in an undertone, without its quite coming to the surface of his consciousness. He was weary by this time, with the unusual excitement of the occasion, and much bewildered. He felt like a person suddenly lifted up a little way from the earth and obliged against his will to walk along unsupported in the air.
His mind was in a perfect whirl. He looked from one new thing to another, wondering more and more what they expected of him. The ribbons and lace of the bureau fixings worried him, and the lace collars and pincushion. What had he to do with such? Those foolish little slippers mocked him with a something that was not in his life, a something for which he was not even trying to fit himself. The organ and the books and, above all, the picture seemed to dominate him and demanded of him things which he could never give. A Sunday-school! What an absurdity! He!
And the eyes in the picture seemed to look into his soul, and to say, all quietly enough, that He had come here now to live, to take command of his home and its occupant.
He rebelled against it, and turned away from the picture. He seemed to hate all the things, and yet the comfort of them drew him irresistibly.
In sheer weariness at last he put out his light, and, wrapping his old blankets about him, lay down upon the rug; for he would not disturb the couch lest the morning should dawn and his new dream of comfort look as if it had fled away. Besides, how was he ever to get it together again? And, when the morning broke and Christie awoke to the splendor of his things by daylight, the wonder of it all dawned, too, and he went about his work with the same spell still upon him.
Now and again he would raise his eyes to the pictured Christ and drop them again, reverently. It seemed to him this morning as if that Presence were living and had come to him in spite of all his railings at fate, his bitterness and scoffing, and his reckless life. It seemed to say with that steady gaze: "What will you do with me? I am here, and you cannot get away from my drawing."
It was not as if his life had been filled formerly with tradition and teaching; for his mother had died when he was a little fellow, and the thin-lipped, hardworking maiden aunt who had cared for him in her place, whatever religion she might have had in her heart, never thought it necessary to speak it out beyond requiring a certain amount of decorum on Sunday and regular attendance at Sunday-school.
In Sunday-school it had been his lot to be under a good elder who read the questions from a lesson leaf and looked helplessly at the boys who were employing their time in more pleasurable things the while. The very small amount of holy things he had absorbed from his days at Sunday-schools had failed to leave him with a strong idea of the love of God or any adequate knowledge of the way to be saved.
In later years, of course, he had listened listlessly to preaching; and, when he went to college—a small, insignificant one,—he had come in contact with religious people; but here, too, he had heard as one hears a thing in which one has not the slightest interest.
He had gathered and held this much, that the God in whom the Christian world believed was holy and powerful, and the most of the world were culprits. Heretofore God's love had passed him by unaware.
Now the pictured eyes of the Son of God seemed to breathe out tenderness and yearning. For the first time in his life a thought of the possibility of love between his soul and God came to him.
His work that morning was much more complicated than usual. He wasted little time in getting breakfast. He had to dean house. He could not bear the idea that the old regime and the new should touch shoulders as they did behind that screen. So with broom and scrubbing-brush he went to work.
He had things in pretty good shape at last, and was just coming in from giving the horse a belated breakfast when a strange impulse seized him.
At his feet, creeping all over the white sand in delicate tracery, were wild pea blossoms, crimson, white, and pink. He had never noticed them before. What were they but weeds? But with a new insight into possibilities in art, he stooped and gathered a few of them, and, holding them awkwardly, went into the house to put them into his new vase. He felt half-ashamed of them, and held them behind him as he entered; but with the shame there mingled an eagerness to see how they would
