Ashurst carelessness, he thought; and beside, his letters were so full of
love, there was no room for theology. But he justified silence by saying
when they were in their own home he would show her the beauty of revealed
religion; she should understand the majesty of the truth; and their
little house, which was to be sacred as the shrine of human love, should
become the very gate of heaven.

It was a very little house, this parsonage. Its sharp pitch roof was
pulled well down over its eyes, which were four square, shining windows,
divided into twenty-four small panes of glass, so full of bubbles and
dimples that they made the passer-by seem sadly distorted, and the spire
of the church opposite have a strange bend in it.

John Ward's study had not a great many books. He could not afford them,
for one reason; but, with a row of Edwards, and some of Dr. Samuel
Hopkins' sermons, and pamphlets by Dr. Emmons, he could spare all but one
or two volumes of Hodge and Shedd, who, after all, but reiterate, in a
form suited to a weaker age, the teachings of Dr. Jonathan Edwards.

The dim Turkey carpet was worn down to the nap in a little path in front
of his bookshelves, where he used to stand absorbed in reading, or where
he walked back and forth, thinking out his dark and threatening sermons.
For before his marriage John preached the law rather than the gospel.

"So I am going to hear you preach on Sunday?" Helen said, the Saturday
morning after their return. "It's odd that I've never heard you, and we
have known each other more than a year."

He was at his desk, and she rested her hand lightly on his shoulder. He
put down his pen, and turned to look up into her face. "Perhaps you will