United States or Mongolia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Presently, leaning right over the pulpit, his eyes fixed on the manor pew just beneath him, he asked in thundering tones "My brethren, have you ever realized what the word LOST means?" Then came a long catalogue of those who in Mr. Cuthbert's opinion would undoubtedly be "lost," in which of course all Erica's friends and relatives were unhesitatingly placed.
She was a kind-eyed Hanoverian, homely and by no means brilliantly clever, but there was something in her unselfishness and in her unassuming humility that won Erica's heart. She never would hear a word against the fraulein. "Why do you care so much for Fraulein Sonnenthal?" she was often asked. "She seems uninteresting and dull to us."
The mother talked on almost unreservedly about the subject that was evidently nearest her heart the difficulties of Erica's education, the harshness they so often met with, the harm it so evidently did the child till the subject of the conversation came down again much too excited and happy to care just then for any unkind treatment.
And her kind and grateful mistress kissed Erica's cheek, though Erica tried to explain that she was thinking most of some one else, when she undertook this expedition. "Then let him thank you in his own way," replied Madame Erlingsen. "Meantime, why should not I thank you in mine?" Stiorna here opened her eyes for an instant.
In spite of his anxiety about the lost packet, Raeburn laughed heartily over Erica's account of this conversation. He had obtained leave to search the deserted hotel, and a little before ten o'clock they made their way across the square, over planks and charred rafters, broken glass, and pools of water, which were hard to steer through in the darkness.
But had he been able to see into Erica's heart, he would have learned that the grief which had left its traces on her face was the grief of knowing that such days as these strengthened and confirmed him in his atheism. Erica was indeed ever confronted with one of the most baffling of all baffling mysteries.
That which often appears sudden and unaccountable is, if we did but know it, a slow, beautiful evolution. It was now very nearly seven years since the autumn afternoon when the man "too nice to be a clergyman," and "not a bit like a Christian," had come to Erica's home, had shown her that at least one of them practiced the universal brotherliness which almost all preached.
Fond as he was of his sister, Mrs. Craigie, and Tom, they constituted rather the innermost circle of his friends and followers; it was Erica who made the HOME, though the others shared the house. It was to Erica's pure child-like devotion that he invariably turned for comfort.
Then, in the opposite case of one as innocent as the whitest flower in all this pasture in my Erica's case, the ghosts she sees are all from passions that leave her heart pure, but bewilder her eyes. It is the fear that she was early made subject to, and the grief that she feels for her mother, that create demons and sprites for her.
Fane-Smith looked very uncomfortable, fearing that her niece might feel hurt at the tone in which "He was an atheist," had been spoken; and indeed Erica's color did rise. "Is that Mr. Farrant the member?" she asked. "Yes," replied her aunt, apprehensively. "Do you know him?"
Word Of The Day