d even by Uncle Isam and Aunt Docia, that
whenever Gabriel was left alone for an instant, his thoughts naturally
deflected into spiritual paths. In the early days of his marriage he had
tried honestly to live up to this exalted idea of his character; then
finding the effort beyond him, and being a man with an innate
detestation of hypocrisy, he had earnestly endeavoured to disabuse his
wife's imagination of the mistaken belief in his divinity. But a notion
once firmly fixed in Mrs. Pendleton's mind might as well have been
embedded in rock. By virtue of that gentle obstinacy which enabled her
to believe in an illusion the more intensely because it had vanished,
she had triumphed not only over circumstances, but over truth itself. By
virtue of this quality, she had created the world in which she moved and
had wrought beauty out of chaos.

"Are you busy with your sermon, dear?" she asked, pausing in the
doorway, and gazing reverently at her husband over the small black silk
bag she carried. Like the other women of Dinwiddie who had lost
relatives by the war, she had never laid aside her mourning since the
surrender; and the frame of crape to her face gave her the pensive look
of one who has stepped out of the pageant of life into the sacred
shadows of memory.

"No, no, Lucy, I'm ready to start out with you," replied the rector
apologetically, putting a box of fishing tackle he had been sorting back
into the drawer of his desk. He was as fond as a child of a day's sport,
and never quite so happy as when he set out with his rod and an old
tomato can filled with worms, which he had dug out of the back garden,
in his hands; but owing to the many calls upon him and his wife's
conception of his clerical dignity, he was seldom able to gratify his
natural tastes.

"Oh, father, please hurry!" called Virginia from the porch, and rising
obediently, he followed Mrs. Pendleton through the hall and out into the
May sunshine, where the little negroes stopped an excited chase of a
black and orange butterfly to return doggedly to their weeding.

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather I'd go to market, Lucy?"

"Quite sure, dear," replied his wife, sniffing the scent of
lilies-of-the-valley with her delicate, slightly pinched nostrils. "I
thought you were going to see Mr. Treadwell about putting John Henry
into the bank," she added. "It is such a pity to keep the poor boy
selling bathtubs. His mother felt it so terribly."

"Ah, so I was--s