They were a pretty pair, the child and the girl, sitting there on the porch with the sunshine sifting down through the lacy leaves of the two big locusts on either side of the door. Philippa wore a pink and green palm-leaf chintz; it had six ruffles around the skirt and was gathered very full about her slender waist; her lips were red, and her cheeks and even her neck were delicately flushed; her red-brown hair was blowing all about her temples; Mary had put an arm around her and was cuddling against her. Yes, even Mary's brother would have thought the two young things a pretty sight had there been nothing more serious to think of. But John Fenn's thoughts were so very serious that even Mary's question caused him no embarrassment; he merely said, stiffly, that he would like to see Miss Philippa alone. "You may wait here, Mary," h e told his little sister, who frowned and sighed and went out to the gate to pull a handful of grass for the roan.
Philippa led her caller to her rarely used parlor, and sat down to listen in silent pallor to his exhortations. She made no explanations for not coming to his church regularly; she offered no excuse of filial tenderness for her indifference to her father's mistaken beliefs; s he looked down at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap, then out of the window at the big roan biting at the hitching-post or standing very still to let Mary rub his silky nose. But John Fenn looked only at Philippa. Of her father's heresies he would not, he said, do more than remind her that the wiles of the devil against her soul might present them-selves through her natural affections; b ut in regard to her failure to wait upon the means of grace he spoke without mercy, for, he said, "faithful are the wounds of a friend."
"Are you my friend?" Philly asked, lifting her gray eyes suddenly.
Mr. Fenn was greatly confused; the text-books of the Western Seminary had not supplied him with the answer to such a question. He explained, hurriedly, that he was the friend of all who wished for salvation.
"I do not especially wish for it,"
Philippa said, very low.
For a moment John Fenn was silent with horror. "That one so young should be so hardened!" he thought; a loud, he bade her remember hell fire.
He spoke with that sad and simple acceptance of the fact with which, even less than fifty years ago, men humbled themselves before the mystery which they had themselves created, of divine injustice. She must know, he said, his voice trembling with sincerity, that those who slighted the offers of grace were cast into outer darkness?
Philly said, softly, "Maybe."
"'Maybe?' Alas, it is, certainly!
Oh, why, WHY do you absent yourself from the house of God?" he said, holding out entreating hands. Philippa made no reply. "Let us pray!" s aid the young man; and they knelt down side by side in the shadowy parlor. John Fenn lifted his harsh, melancholy face, gazing upward passionately, while he wrestled for her salvation; Philly, looking downward, tracing with a trembling finger the pattern of the beadwork on the ottoman before which she knelt, listened with an inward shiver of dismay and ecstasy.
But when they rose to their feet she had nothing to say. He, too, was silent. He went away quite exhausted by his struggle with this impassive, unresisting creature.
He hardly spoke to Mary all the way home. "A hardened sinner," he was thinking. "Poor, lovely creature! So young and so lost!" Under Mary's incessant chatter, her tugs at the end of the reins, her little bursts of joy at the sight of a bird or a roadside flower, he was thinking, with a strange new pain--a pain no other sinner had ever roused in him--of the girl he had left. He knew that his arguments had not moved her. "I believe," he thought, the color rising in his face, "that she dislikes me! She says she loves Dr. Lavendar; yes, she must dislike me.
Is my manner too severe? Perhaps my appearance is unattractive." He looked down at his coat uneasily.
As for Philly, left to herself, she picked up a bit of sewing, and her face, at first pale, grew slowly pink. "He only likes sinners," she thought; "and, oh, I am not a sinner!"
