"
Mrs. Roughsedge gave a doubtful assent. As to the Church feeling, she
was not so clear as Miss Bertram. One of her chief friends was a
secularist cobbler who lived under the very shadow of the church. The
Miss Bertrams shuddered at his conversation. Mrs. Roughsedge found him
racy company, and he presented to her aspects of village life and
opinion with which the Miss Bertrams were not at all acquainted.
* * * * *
As the mother and son approached the old house in the sunset light, its
aspect of mellow and intimate congruity with the woods and fields about
it had never been more winning. The red, gray, and orange of its old
brickwork played into the brown and purples of its engirdling trees,
into the lilacs and golds and crimsons of the western sky behind it,
into the cool and quiet tones of the meadows from which it rose. A
spirit of beauty had been at work fusing man's perishable and passing
work with Nature's eternal masterpiece; so that the old house had in it
something immortal, and the light which played upon it something gently
personal, relative, and fleeting. Winter was still dominant; a northeast
wind blew.
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