361
August 1931
B u s i n e s s
T h e
K i n g ’ s
^ } f e a r l io Ç j lfe a r i telili 0^ )u rY OUNG READERS . . . By FLORENCE NYE WH ITWELL
RAINBOW ( Continued from last month )
as she knew a good visitor to Great Britain should do, without too much garnishing of the eggeup and surround ing scenery. “Then your trouble arose through people, and yet you looked for a source of relief in more people. Not the same people, to be sure, but yet people—human beings?” She was certainly very logical, this woman. “I suppose so,” admitted Beatrice, hiding as much of her face as possible in her teacup. She knew she should inevitably agree with all of this remarkable person’s con clusions. Miss Lansdowne instantly perceived this and descended upon it with all the energy of a plunging eagle. “And you are still looking for relief from people—me, for instance,” she announced with great clarity. No teacup of any dimensions could conceal Beatrice’s confusion. She blushed! “H ’m ! The blush is still found among the aborigines whose habitat is mountainous parts of America,” reflected the girl’s famous vis a vis. “You said—” she faltered a little, “you said you knew the place where—” “A h ! rainbow’s end—fanciful but compelling! But what do you really mean by rainbow’s end? That pot of gold, so fabulously there, is not money or gain for you. You seek the happy state of mind which you enjoyed in your girlhood, in which you were surrounded, protected, and quite totally not prepared to meet existing conditions.” “Don’t tell me I have a mother-complex,” pleaded Beatrice softly. “But that’s just what you have! Why are you so afraid of terms? This phraseology merely signifies that you have never met your environment unaided. You have been directed. You still desire to be directed. But God is wisely pushing you out of the nest. Pretty soon, after you’ve flopped and tumbled a trifle, you’ll begin to enjoy flying.” Beatrice’s downy babyish brows, which had come to her along with her fluff of fine-spun golden hair, drew to gether dubiously, and her brown eyes clouded. “But you do not understand,” she pleaded. Then she spoke rapidly and steadily for a long time, and Miss Lansdowne ceased eating her breakfast as she listened. When the girl had finished, her voice dropped to silence as the murmur of a fountain fails suddenly, and there was a moment’s pause. Beatrice’s eyes were lowered. Then Miss Lansdowne reflectively gave to her a strong white hand with a clasp that somehow conveyed a world of genuine sympathy and understanding. “They have done you a service, Beatrice,” she said finally. “If they have made you suffer, they have indeed done you a favor. Suffering endured as unto the Lord is the greatest power generator I know of.” Then, seeing that the sympathy and, the words so kindly spoken were too much for the quivering young soul before her, she drew the girl to a secluded nook. “Now, my dear,” she began in a tone that quieted and
"And God said, This is the token of the covenant ■which I make between me and you and every living crea ture . . . I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass when I shall bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud” (Gen. 9: 12-14). eateice had followed Miss Lansdowne. There were several reasons why she meekly trailed after this unusual person. One was that she had nothing else to do, and she reasoned that she might as well follow on. But the chief attraction was that rain bow’s end—the little fiction about something that Beatrice was expecting of life. She thought she caught its glim mer here. When a young girl is discovered reading out of a New Testament to an elderly woman whose desperate condi tion is self-evident, and when this all occurs at an early morning hour on a well-known bridge leading out of the largest, darkest English-speaking city in the world, re markable results sometimes ensue. Not invariably, but sometimes! This had been one of the times. Beatrice had not been able to sleep. She had gone over the past months of her life, piecing together this and that occurrence, until she had come to a fairly clear conception of what had caused Althea to ask her to remain behind. It was all too intolerable! She slept for a few hours and awakened at daybreak. “There’s just one thing to do—try and bring some one to Christ,” she said to herself. Soon afterward, she had been put in touch with one who was so much sadder, so much less fortunate than herself, that her own clouds seemed to melt away as she spoke to her of Christ and of His keeping power. This had drawn to her the attention of one who had all her life been working for the better ment of humanity, Miss Lansdowne. “I thought the golden age might be brought in by us,” she had remarked. “But no! It is to come another, God’s way!” What did she mean? Beatrice 'wondered much. And then came that never-to-be-forgotten breakfast in the great London hotel. The little New Testament lay be tween them. “Why did you become disillusioned?” Miss Lans downe asked briskly as she ate her breakfast with dis patch. “What did these— religious people, let us call them, with whom you found yourself, do to throw you off your course ?” “It—it’s rather a long story,” Beatrice murmured, as she tried with especial care to eat her egg out of its shell, B
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