When Philippa Roberts had fled out into the night for help, her father and old Hannah were too alarmed to notice her absence. They went hurrying back and forth with this remedy and that. Again and again they were ready to give up; once Henry Roberts said, "He is gone!" and once Hannah began to cry, and said, "Poor lad, poor boy!" Yet each made one more effort, their shadows looming gigantic against the walls or stretching across the ceiling, bending and sinking as they knelt beside the poor young man, who by that time was beyond speech. So the struggle went on. But little by little life began to gain. John Fenn's eyes opened. Then he smiled.
Then he said something-they could not hear what.
"Bless the Lord!" said Henry Roberts.
"He's asking for Philly," said old Hannah. By the time the doctor and Philippa reached the house the shadow of death had lifted.
"It must have been poison," Mr.
Roberts told the doctor. "When he gets over it he will tell us what it was."
"I don't believe he will," said William King; he was holding Fenn's wrist between his firm fingers, and then he turned up a fluttering eyelid and looked at the still dulled eye.
Philippa, kneeling on the other side of John Fenn, said loudly: "I will tell HIM--and perhaps God will forgive me."
The doctor, glancing up at her, said:
"No, you won't--anyhow at present.
Take that child up-stairs, Hannah," h e commanded, "and put her to bed.
She ran all the way to Old Chester to get me," he explained to Henry Roberts.
Before he left the house that night he sat for a few minutes at Philippa's bedside.
"My dear little girl," he said, in his kind, sensible voice, "the best thing to do is to forget it. It was a foolish thing to do--that charm business; but happily no harm is done. Now say nothing about it, and never do it again."
Philippa turned her shuddering face away. "Do it again? OH!"
As William King went home he apologized to Jinny for that cut across her flanks by hanging the reins on the overhead hook, and letting her plod along at her own pleasure. He was saying to himself that he hoped he had done right to tell the child to hold her tongue.
"It was just tomfoolery," he argued;
"there was no sin about it, so confession wouldn't do her any good; on the contrary, it would hurt a girl's self-respect to have a man know she had tried to catch him. But what a donkey he was not to see.... Oh yes;
I'm sure I'm right," said William King.
"I wonder how Dr. Lavendar would look at it?"
Philippa, at any rate, was satisfied with his advice. Perhaps the story of what she had done might have broken from her pale lips had her father asked any questions; but Henry Roberts had retreated into troubled silence. There had been one wonderful moment when he thought that at last his faith was to be justified and by the unbeliever himself! and he had cried out, with a passion deferred for more than thirty years: "The VOICE!" But behold, the voice, babbling and meaningless, was nothing but sickness. No one could guess what the shock of that disappointment was. He was not able even to speak of it. So Philippa was asked no awkward questions, and her self-knowledge burned deep into her heart.
In the next few days, while the minister was slowly recovering in the great four-poster in Henry Roberts's guest-room, she listened to Hannah's speculations as to the cause of his attack, and expressed no opinion. She was dumb when John Fenn tried to tell her how grateful he was to her for that terrible run through the darkness for his sake.
"You should not be grateful," she said, at last, in a whisper.
But he was grateful; and, furthermore, he was very happy in those days of slow recovery. The fact was that that night, when he had been so near death, he had heard Philippa, in his first dim moments of returning consciousness, stammering out those distracted words: "Perhaps God will forgive me."
To John Fenn those words meant the crowning of all his efforts: she had repented!
"Truly," he said, lying very white and feeble on his pillow and looking into Philly's face when she brought him his gruel, "truly, "He moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform!"
The "mysterious way" was the befalling of that terrible illness in Henry Roberts's house, so that Philippa should be impressed by it. "If my affliction has been blessed to any one else, I am glad to have suffered it," he said.
Philippa silently put a spoonful of gruel between his lips; he swallowed it as quickly as he could.
"I heard you call upon God for forgiveness; the Lord is merciful and gracious!"
Philly said, very low, "Yes; oh YES."
So John Fenn thanked God and took his gruel, and thought it was very good.
He thought, also, that Miss Philippa was very good to be so good to him. In those next few days, before he was strong enough to be moved back to his own house, he thought more of her goodness and less of her salvation. It was then that he had his great moment, his revealing moment! All of a sudden, at the touch of Life, his honest artificiality had dropped from him, and he knew that he had never before known anything worth knowing! He knew he was in love. He knew it when he realized that he was not in the least troubled about her soul. "That is what she meant!" he thought; "she wanted me to care for her, before I c ared for her soul." He was so ****** in his acceptance of the revelation that she loved him, that when he went to ask her to be his wife the blow of her reply almost knocked him back into his ministerial affectations:
"No."
When John Fenn got home that evening he went into his study and shut the door. Mary came and pounded on it, but he only said, in a muffled voice:
"No, Mary. Not now. Go away."
He was praying for resignation to what he told himself was the will of God.
"The Lord is unwilling that my thoughts should be diverted from His service by my own personal happiness." Then he tried to put his thoughts on that service by deciding upon a text for his next sermon. But the texts which suggested themselves were not steadying to his bewildered mind:
"LOVE ONE ANOTHER." ("I certainly thought she loved me.")
