Page:Tales of two countries.djvu/35

Rh forefathers. But then he remembered that he himself had gone through the same course in his boyhood, so that it must be all right. Ansgarius would be a man of peace none the less—and if not! "Well, everything is in the hand of Providence," said the Pastor confidingly, and set to work again at his sermon.

"You're quite forgetting your lunch to-day, father," said a blond head in the door-way.

"Why, so I am, Rebecca; I’m a whole hour too late," answered the father, and went at once into the dining-room.

The father and daughter sat down at the luncheon-table. Ansgarius was always his own master on Saturdays, when the Pastor was taken up with his sermon.

You would not easily have found two people who suited each other better, or who lived on terms of more intimate friendship, than the Pastor and his eighteen-year-old daughter. She had been motherless from childhood; but there was so much that was womanly in her gentle, even-tempered father, that the young girl, who remembered her mother only as a pale face that smiled on her, felt the loss rather as a peaceful sorrow than as a bitter pain.

And for him she came to fill up more and more, as she ripened, the void that had been left in his soul; and all the tenderness, which at his wife's death had been so clouded in sorrow and longing,