His
father was to him a downy nest inside a stone-castle.
They all sat together round the kitchen fire. The laird fell into a
gentle monologue, in which, to Joan's thinking, he talked even more
strangely than Cosmo. Things born in the fire and the smoke, like
the song of the three holy children, issued from the furnace
clothed in softest moonlight. Joan said to herself it was plain
where the boy got his oddity; but what she called oddity was but
sense from a deeper source than she knew the existence of. He read
them also passages of the book then occupying him so much: Joan
wondered what attraction such a jumble of good words and no sense
could have for a man so capable in ordinary affairs. Then came
supper; and after that, for the first time in her life, Joan was
present when a man had the presumption to speak to his Maker direct
from his own heart, without the mediation of a book. This she found
odder than all the rest; she had never even heard of such a thing!
So peculiar, so unfathomable were his utterances, that it never
occurred to her the man might be meaning something; farther from
her still was the thought, that perhaps God liked to hear him, was
listening to him and understanding him, and would give him the
things he asked. She heard only an extraordinary gibberish,
supposed suitable to a religious observance--family prayers, she
thought it must be! She felt confused, troubled, ashamed--so
grievously out of her element that she never knew until they rose,
that the rest were kneeling while she sat staring into the fire.
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