rious sort of scorn, which was half shame, at the familiar
phrases used concerning it. When she had heard of such and such a one
that "he was serious," that he had "experienced conviction," she had
been filled with disgust. The spiritual nature of it all was to her
mind treated materially, like an attack of the measles or mumps. She
had seen people unite with the church of which her mother had been a
member, and heard them subscribe to and swear their belief in
articles of faith, which seemed to her monstrous. Religion had never
impressed her with any beauty, or sense of love. Now, for the first
time, after her father had died, she seemed all at once to sense the
nearness of that which is beyond, and a love and longing for it,
which is the most primitive and subtlest instinct of man, filled her
very soul. Her love for her father projected her consciousness of him
beyond this world. In the midst of her grief a strange peace was over
her, and a realization of love which she had never had before. Maria,
at this period, had she been a Catholic, might have become a
religious devotee. She seemed to have visions of the God-man crowned
with thorns, the rays of unutterable and eternal love, and sacred
agony for love's sake. She said to herself that she loved God, that
her father had gone to him. Moreover, she took a certain delight in
thinking that her own mother, with her keen tongue and her heart of
true gold, had him safe with her. She regarded Ida with a sort of
covert triumph during those days after the funeral, when the sweet,
sickly fragrance of the funeral flowers still permeated the house.
Maria did not weep much after the first. She was not one to whom
tears came easily after her childhood. She carried about with her
what seemed like an aching weight and sense of loss, along with that
strange new conviction of love and being born for ultimate happiness
which had come to her at the time of her father's death.

The spring was very early that year. The apple-trees were in blossom
at an unusual time. There was a tiny orchard back of the Edgham
house. Maria used to steal away down there, sit down on the grass,
speckled with pink-and-white petals, and look up through the rosy
radiance of bloom at the infinite blue light of the sky. It seemed to
her for the first time she laid hold on life in the midst of death.
She wondered if she could always feel as she did then. She had a
premonition that this state, which bordered on ecs