“And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature . . . 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 bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud” (Gen. 9:12-14). t RACE across Europe—that was what it had been! They sat fairly gasping for breath in a Paris hotel, and looked at each other with a sort of amazement—Althea, Mrs. Sumner, Constance, and Beatrice. What a trip! It was all so dif ferent from what any one had planned. Instead a rush across a series of countries that were too evident ly troubled themselves. Uneasy nations and uneasy peo ple ! There had been one little island of peace in the whole hurried rush, Beatrice reflected. Dreamily she recalled a precious half hour in a cathedral that they had visited between trains. Beatrice had looked up at the far-hung arches and had remembered many of her father’s descrip tions. She tried to imagine sotme antiphonal choral echoing through a vast early Gothic structure. What sort of people were they, she wondered, that wrote and sang and listened there, in the older day to such music ? Broad cheeked, were they, like the Flemish and Dutch pictures? Placid and never rushing, probably! Women with fair, firm skin, untouched by modern fatigue! And rosy chil dren—certainly the children were rosy! Sturdy, unhur ried men, who looked quietly out upon a world that was more natural, if less convenient! Beatrice thought of the dominance of time and spate that had come to be. The steel that was everywhere today instead of stone! Steel ships, too, that had replaced iron ships, that had replaced, in their time, wooden ships! Were these days of machines and power better days, she wondered, than those that had produced arches and naves and windows such as these, that made the breath to catch in one’s throat for very rapture? Steel! There was a man of steel—called “steel,” too—who was clamped upon Russia! And there was an electric power plant for the Jordan! And then, just be fore Althea carried her off to the train, she found the an swer to it all. The cablegram, that had broken up the peaceful so journ in Jerusalem, had come from Constance’s cousin, Eleanor Gorham, in New York. Since Eleanor had come to have a personal love for Christ as her Saviour, many things in her life had been changed. Loud were the pro tests among her friends, and her younger brother, still in his teens, had cried the loudest. In the vernacular so dear to his heart, he had proclaimed that “Nell used to
i ! £Heart to '¿Heart clo)itli &ur 'Young Readers I B y Florence N ye Whitwell — •>— Rainbow [Continued from last month )
be the best scout ever. But now she is a false alarm.” Eleanor had not minded—much. But, to her dismay, she found that the boy Rodney had determined to go as far and as fast in the opposite direction as he could. It is sometimes so when those who are near to the called and chosen are convicted by the new life that they see begun in the lives of those about. They find that the familiar face has—new light. The old things are put away. A life of separation begins. The heart of the observer becomes vaguely alarmed. Molly, or Tom, or Nell, seemed perfectly all right to them before. Why this change in their lives now ? And, horror of horrors, what if such a change should be demanded of them! Perish the thought! Immediate measures must be taken! And the underlying desire of retaliation is sometimes one of the many motives, so that a difficult time begins for the young Christian. “It is not necessary to make every one around you uncomfortable, is it? You see what your fanaticism is doing to me—it’s just driving me away from all religion.” This is the approved formula very often. And this was the course taken by Rodney Gorham. It had finally ended in publicity for the Gorhams-1—un pleasant publicity. Eleanor was blamed. She bore the persecution meekly, only stipulating that it seemed hardly fair to blame Rodney’s misdeeds on her Christian life. “If you had gone around with Rodney as you used .to do, he would never have gotten into trouble,” she was told. Rodney at this point created a necessity for immediate action and a cessation of reproaches by disappearing com pletely. The newspapers considered his family ties and gave the matter space. “Another American school boy disappears,” etc. The foreign papers, however, did not copy, so that the first news of the affair came to Con stance and Althea in ,a cabled message which asked them to meet a certain steamer as it docked in Cherbourg, for they thought Rodney had been traced to that ship. Yes! Detectives were to be on the lookout, but the family touch was desired. Rodney liked Connie. And so came the hurried trip to Paris, to catch the boy if he were on board. Beatrice had decided to go, too. She was lonely, and the prospect of being with those wonderful Thin Red Line people looked very attractive to the solitary girl. The Personage saw them off with moist eyes. “Ah! La pauvre petite Guicciardi,” he said, inwardly, as he shook his fine grizzled head. “That little Beatrice! She makes me very sorry. She has not told them all of her story yet. And will she? Has she told it to me, even?” And the Personage'went sadly back to his hotel. sjc H« * Beatrice was alone in London. It seemed to her’a city deserted. The human beings she was passing, and sometimes touching as she passed, were unreal entities.
of a leisurely, contemplative journey, full of castles and cathedrals and mellow medieval memories, there had been
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