“I am ashamed of you,” she told her son. “This girl is scarcely twenty. If I remember rightly, and I’m sure that I do, you came to me, at about twenty, and confessed to a logical disbelief in the theory of creation, which included, of course, a disbelief in the Creator. You were an infidel, an atheist. You were going to relinquish your studies, and give up all thought of the Church.”
The deep red of the Reverend Smith Boyd’s face testified to the truth of this cruel charge, and he pushed back his fish permanently.
“I most humbly confess,” he stated, and indeed he had writhed in spirit many times over that remembrance. “However, mother, I have since discovered that to be a transitional stage through which every theological student passes.”
“Yet you won’t allow it to a girl,” charged Mrs. Boyd, with the severity which she could much better have expressed with a laugh. “When you discover that this young lady, who seems to be in every way delightful, is so misled as to criticise the motives of Market Square Church, you withdraw into your dignity, with the privilege of a layman, and announce that ‘you do not approve of her.’ What she needs, Tod, is religious instruction.”
She had carefully ironed out the tiny little wrinkles around her blue eyes by the time her son looked up from the profound cogitation into which this reproof had thrown him.
“Mother, I have been wrong,” he admitted, and he seemed ever so much brighter for the confession. He drew his fish towards him and ate it.
Later the Reverend Smith Boyd presented himself at James Sargent’s house, with a new light shining in his breast; and he had blue eyes. He had come to show Gail the way and the light. If she had doubts, and lack of faith, and flippant irreverence, it was his duty to be patient with her, for this was the fault of youth. He had been youthful himself.
Gail’s eyelids dropped and the corners of her lips twitched when the Reverend Smith Boyd’s name was brought up to her, but she did her hair in another way, high on her head instead of low on her neck, and then she went down, bewildering in her simple little dark blue velvet cut round at the neck.
“I am so glad your cold is better,” she greeted him, smiling as pleasantly as if their last meeting had been a most joyous occasion.