Hitherto it was only in summer that he had felt
the presence of a power in her and yet above her: in winter, now,
the sky was true and deep, though the world was waste and sad; and
the tones of the wind that roared at night about the goddess-haunted
house, and moaned in the chimneys of the lowly dwelling that nestled
against it, woke harmonies within him which already he tried to
spell out falteringly. Miss St. John began to find that he put
expressions of his own into the simple things she gave him to play,
and even dreamed a little at his own will when alone with the
passive instrument. Little did Mrs. Falconer think into what a
seventh heaven of accursed music she had driven her boy.
But not yet did he tell his friend, much as he loved and much as he
trusted her, the little he knew of his mother's sorrows and his
father's sins, or whose the hand that had struck him when she found
him lying in the waste factory.
For a time almost all his trouble about God went from him. Nor do I
think that this was only because he rarely thought of him at all:
God gave him of himself in Miss St. John. But words dropped now and
then from off the shelves where his old difficulties lay, and they
fell like seeds upon the heart of Miss St. John, took root, and rose
in thoughts: in the heart of a true woman the talk of a child even
will take life.
One evening Robert rose from the table, not unwatched of his
grandmother, and sped swiftly and silently through the dark, as was
his custom, to enter the chamber of enchantment.
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