The effect of this glance which she found upon herself from time to time was to make Nancy suspect herself--to question her motives and try her defenses. To her amazement she found these latter weak under Bernal's gaze, and there grew in her a tender remorse for the injustice she had done her husband. From little pricking suspicions on the first day she came on the last to conviction. It seemed that being with Bernal had opened her eyes to Allan's worth. She had narrowly, flippantly misjudged a good man--good in all essentials. She was contrite for her unwifely lack of abnegation. She began to see herself and Allan with Bernal's eyes: she was less than she had thought--he was more. Bernal had proved these things to her all unconsciously. Now her heart was flooded with gratitude for his simple, ready, heartfelt praise of his brother--of his unfailing good-temper, his loyalty, his gifts, his modesty so often distressed by outspoken admiration of his personal graces. She listened and applauded with a heart that renewed itself in all good resolves of devotion. Even when Bernal talked of himself, he made her feel that she had been unjust to Allan.
Little by little she drew many things from him--the story of his journeyings and of his still more intricate mental wanderings. And it thrilled her to think he had come back with a message--even though he already doubted himself. Sometimes he would be jocular about it and again hot with a passion to express himself.
"Nance," he said on another night, "when you have a real faith in God a dead man is a miracle not less than a living--and a live man dying is quite as wondrous as a dead man living. Do you know, I was staggered one day by discovering that the earth didn't give way when I stepped on it? The primitive man knowing little of physics doesn't know that a child's hand could move the earth through space--but for a certain mysterious resistance. That's God. I felt him all that day, at every step, pushing the little globe back under me--counteracting me--resisting me--ever so gently. Those are times when you feel you must tell it, Nance--when the God-consciousness comes."
"Oh, Bernal, if you could--if you could come back to do what your grandfather really wanted you to do--to preach something worth while!"