His father and mother received him with more warmth than he had ever known them to show. They were in good spirits about him, for they had all the time been receiving news of him and Barbara, with not a word of Alice, from old Simon. Jane’s heart swelled with the ambition that her boy should as a workingman gain the love of a well-born girl.

Mrs. Tuke loved the boy, but she was constantly haunted with a vague uneasiness—about the possible consequences of what she had done so long ago. This uneasiness had its share in repressing the show of her love, and making her go to church regularly. Her pleasure in going was not great, but she was not the less troubled that Richard did not care about going. She sojourned still in the land of bullocks and goats—she went to church with the idea that she was doing something for God in going. It is always the way. Until we know God, we seek to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about, while the things for which he sent his Son, we regard of little or no importance.

Mrs. Tuke noted that whenever Richard was quiet, a shadow settled on his face and he looked lost and sad. It occurred to her that of course he must miss Barbara. In the evening he asked his mother if she would not like him to go to church with her, feeling that in church he would be nearer Barbara, for he knew that now she went often.

But alas, while he sat there he felt himself drifting farther and farther from her. The foolish statements of the preacher made him regret he had gone. They awoke all his old feelings of repulsion. There was no ring of reality, no spark of divine fire, no common sense, and little of truth. The clergyman was not a hypocrite. He was in some measure even a devout man. But in his whole presentation of God and our relation to him, there was neither thought nor phrase germane to sunrise or sunset, to the firmament or the wind or the grass or the trees, nothing that came to the human soul as having a reality true as that of the world but higher, as touching the hopes and necessities of the heart and mind. There was no glow, no enthusiasm in the man—neither could there be, with the notions he held. His God suggested a police magistrate—and not a just one.