"There's a divinity that shapes our ends," thought the Rev. Charles, as he tucked away these letters into respective pigeon-holes. "A deaconess is demanded by one friend, and another one has one to offer! I am not responsible. Fate will win—Fate and Mrs. Dorrs-Flathers, I mean."
"And I came to find a deaconess, and I found you!"
The Rev. Charles Archibald stood hat in hand, the wind playing with his soft brown hair, the setting sun shining upon his smooth-shaven face, emphasizing its lines of culture. In front of him, looking out across Lake Squam, stood Theodora Hart, a tall, girlishly built woman of twenty-seven, whose health of body and refinement of soul supplemented each other in graceful form and pleasing motion. She wandered across the gravel path skirting the hotel and stood by the clump of sumac, where seats invited one to rest and look upon the lake. The bishop-elect followed.
For three days they had known each other; three wonderful days to the woman—days of inspiration!
They had met on the pretty, white porch of Sister Katharine's cottage. The rapid conversation concerning the work of a deaconess in general and her own work in particular had led them into an intimate relation,—which can grow like quick-grass in summer, when life is at the high tide of the year.
Theodora Hart's work was so much a part of her that in talking of it she revealed not only its results and its possibilities, but her very self. The bishop-elect had, in turn, talked more freely of himself than was his wont. He had told Miss Hart of the parish work at St. Stephen's, its growing demands and his pride in the increase of its resources. He let the reminiscent personal equation have full play, recalling his boyhood ambitions, and his mother's joy in his choice of a life-work. Under cover of the stars alone as they sat in the jasmine-clad porch, Mr. Archibald had gone still farther: he told her of his greatest ambition—the bishopric. She, with the impulse of a girl, had responded, "Why! I'll pray that God may grant so great a heart's desire!"
Now, at the end of the third day, they were together for the last time. On the morrow the deaconess must assume her garb and return to the village of C—mont, where she was giving her services for the summer.
To Mr. Archibald these hours together had, to be sure, quickened life anew, but it was not the spiritual quickening of one whose nature is aroused by the influence of good womanhood. Rather it was a translating. For the time being he was taken from the monotony of ecclesiastical and social routine and habit and given a freedom which was almost primal. He realized life and self as he had not realized them for years—their appeal, the supremacy of nature. His wife's long invalidism had brought domestic self-effacement to him. He thought it had strengthened service and sacrifice. And so it had, doubtless. But it had fostered also a dominant egoism, which was nourished by the admiration of his parishioners and the never-forgetting ambition in the man's heart. But to-night things took upon themselves a different aspect. The man in him, the best that manhood has to offer in elemental emotion, was stirred by his environment and companionship. He effaced the past; he cared not for the future. St. Stephen's was as if it had never been. The bishopric dropped below the horizon. Pie, at forty-five, was still a youth; she, not yet thirty, was a girl. Life, pressing and human, was theirs; they could not escape it. It was part of the sunset hour. If life might always be such—simple, full, abiding!
"You will come to us? We need you!"
"I do not see the way clear. No, Mr. Archibald, I think my work lies here. I am told that I really succeed with these country folk; that I have a 'way with me' which opens the heart of the hungry women—those who for years have lived on the hillside or in the valleys of these mountainous regions, knowing, unknowingly, eternal truths, but who are absolutely out of touch with humanity in its highest sense. It is not the Prayer-book that I take to them. Over on Moat Mountain and across Chocorua in the township of Passaconaway the women do not need a deaconess. They need just a woman friend! Can you understand?"
