He is better to us than man.
Yolland says I may be with you at church early to-morrow."
Then my cheeks flushed hot with joy, and I said how thankful I was
that all this had not distracted his thoughts from the subject.
"When I wanted help more than ever?" he said.
So in some ways that was to me at least a gladsome Sunday, though not
half so much at the time as it has become in remembrance, and I could
not guess how much of conscious peace or joy Harold felt, as, for the
first and only time, he and I knelt together on the chancel step.
He said nothing, but he had quite recovered his usual countenance and
manner, only looking more kind and majestic than ever, as I, his fond
aunt, thought, when we went among the children after the school
service, to give them the little dainties they had missed in his
absence; and he smiled when they came round him with their odd little
bits of chatter.
We sat over the fire in the evening, and talked a little of surface
things, but that died away, and after a quarter of an hour or so, he
looked up at me and said, "And what next?"
"What are we to do, do you mean?" I said, for I had been thinking how
all his schemes of life had given way. We spoke of it together.
"Old Eu did not want him," as he said, and though there was much for
him to do at the Hydriot works and the Mission Chapel, the Reading
Room, the Association for Savings, and all the rest which needed his
eye, yet for Viola's peace he thought he ought not to stay, and the
same cause hindered the schemes he had once shared with Dermot; he
had cut himself loose from Australia, and there seemed nothing before
him.
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