Moth and Rust; Together with Geoffrey's Wife and The Pitfall. Mary Cholmondeley

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СКАЧАТЬ glad it isn't poetry. Is it about love?"

      "Yes."

      "I used not to care to read about love, but now I think I should like it very much."

      A swift emotion passed over Anne's face. She took up the book, and slowly opened it. Janet looked with admiration at her slender hands.

      "I wish mine were white like hers," she thought, as she looked at her own far more beautiful but slightly tanned hands, folded together in her lap in an attitude of attention.

      Anne hesitated a moment, and then began to read:

      "I had journeyed some way in life, I was travel-stained and weary, when I met Love. In the empty, glaring highway I met him, and we walked in it together. I had not thought he fared in such steep places, having heard he was a dweller in the sheltered gardens, which were not for me. Nevertheless he went with me. I never stopped for him, or turned aside out of my path to seek him, for I had met his counterfeit when I was young, and I distrusted strangers afterwards. And I prayed to God to turn my heart wholly to Himself, and to send Love away, lest he should come between me and Him. But when did God hearken to any prayer of mine?

      "And Love was grave and stern. And as we walked he showed me the dew upon the grass, and the fire in the dew, the things I had seen all my life and had never understood. And he drew the rainbow through his hand. I was one with the snowdrop and with the thunderstorm. And we went together upon the sea, swiftly up its hurrying mountains, swiftly down into its rushing valleys. And I was one with the sea. And all fear ceased out of my life, and a great awe dwelt with me instead. And Love wore a human face. But I knew that was for a moment only. Did not Christ the same?

      "And Love showed me the hearts of my brothers in the crowd. And, last of all, he showed me myself, with whom I had lived in ignorance. And I was humbled.

      "And then Love, who had given me all, asked for all. And I gave reverence, and patience, and faith, and hope, and intuition, and service. I even gave him truth. I put my hands under his feet. But he said it was not enough. So I gave him my heart. That was the last I had to give.

      "And Love took it in a great tenderness and smote it. And in the anguish the human face of Love vanished away.

      "And afterwards, long years afterwards, when I was first able to move and look up, I saw Love, who, as I thought, was gone, keeping watch beside me. And I saw his face clear, without the human veil between me and it. And it was the Face of God. And I saw that Love and God are one, and that, because of His exceeding glory, He had been constrained to take flesh even as Christ took it, so that my dim eyes might be able to apprehend Him. And I saw that it was He and He only who had walked with me from the first."

      Anne laid down the book. She looked fixedly out across the quiet gardens, with their long shadows, to the still, sun-lit woods beyond. Her face changed, as the face of one who, in patient endurance, has long rowed against the stream, and who at last lets the benign, constraining current take her whither it will. The look of awed surrender seldom seen on a living face, seldom absent from the faces of the newly dead, rested for a moment on Anne's.

      "I don't think," said Janet, "I quite understand what it means, because I was not sure whether it was a lady or a gentleman that was speaking."

      Anne started violently, and turned her colourless face towards the voice. It seemed to recall her from a great distance. She had forgotten Janet. She had been too far off to hear what she had said.

      "I like the bit about giving Love our hearts," said Janet tentatively. "It means something the same as the sermon did this morning, doesn't it, about not laying up our treasure upon earth?"

      There was a silence.

      "Yes," said Anne gently, her voice and face quivering a little, "perhaps it does. I had not thought of it in that way till you mentioned it, but I see what you mean."

      "That we ought to put religion first."

      "Y-yes."

      "I am so glad you read that to me," continued Janet comfortably, "because I had an idea that you and I should feel the same about"—she hesitated—"about love. I mean," she corrected herself, "you would, if you were engaged."

      "I have never been engaged," said Anne, in the tone of one who gently but firmly closes a subject.

      "When you are," said Janet, peacefully pursuing the topic, and looking at her with tender confidence, "you will feel like me, that it's—just everything."

      "Shall I?"

      "I don't know any poetry, except two lines that George copied out for me—

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