Page:Rilla of Ingleside (1921).djvu/329

 “But I would rather not go to church this morning, Mrs. Dr. dear,” she explained. “If Whiskers-on-the-moon were there and I saw him looking holy and pleased, as he always looks when he thinks the Huns are winning, I fear I would lose my patience and my sense of decorum and hurl a Bible or hymn-book at him, thereby disgracing myself and the sacred edifice. No, Mrs. Dr. dear I shall stay home from Church till the tide turns and pray hard here.”

“I think I might as well stay home, too, for all the good church will do me today,” Miss Oliver said to Rilla, as they walked down the hard-frozen red road to the church. “I can think of nothing but the question, ‘Does the line still hold?’”

“Next Sunday will be Easter,” said Rilla. “Will it herald death or life to our cause?”

Mr. Meredith preached that morning from the text, “He that endureth to the end shall be saved,” and hope and confidence rang through his inspiring sentences. Rilla, looking up at the memorial tablet on the wall above their pew, “sacred to the memory of Walter Cuthbert Blythe,” felt herself lifted out of her dread and filled anew with courage. Walter could not have laid down his life for naught. His had been the gift of prophetic vision and he had foreseen victory. She would cling to that belief—the line would hold.

In this renewed mood she walked home from church almost gaily. The others, too, were hopeful, and all went smiling into Ingleside. There was no one in the living room, save Jims, who had fallen asleep on the sofa, and Doc, who sat “hushed in grim repose” on the hearth-rug, looking very Hydeish indeed. No one was in the dining room either,—and, stranger still, no