There & Back by MacDonald, George, 1824-1905

Happily Barbara was not in the church that morning.

The next Sunday the squire's pew was empty. The red volume lay open on its face upon the floor of it.

Wingfold's dear plot had palled. He had rough-hewed his end, but the divinity had shaped it. When the squire came to know what had taken place, he made his first call on the rector. He said nothing about his wife, but plainly wished it understood that he bore him no ill will for what he had done.

CHAPTER XXII.

_THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER._

The rector had often wished his wife could in some natural way get hold of Miss Wylder; he suspected something exceptionally fine in her: how else could she, with such a father and such a mother, have such a countenance? There must be a third factor in the affair, and one worth knowing--namely herself! That she seemed to avoid being reckoned among church-goers might be a point in her favour! What reports reached him of her wild ways, mingled with exaggerated stories of her lawlessness, did not shock him: what was true in them might spring from mere exuberance of life, whose joy was her only law--and yet a real law to her!

He had had no opportunity of learning either how peculiar the girl was, or how capable. She was not yet up to his teaching; she had to have other water to drink first, and was now approaching a source that might have caused him anxiety for her, had he ever so little believed in chance. But a shepherd is none the less a true shepherd that he leaves plenty of liberty to the lamb to pick its own food. That its best instincts may not be to the taste either of its natural guardians or the public, is nothing against those instincts. Without appearing to their guardians both strange and headstrong, some sheep would never get near the food necessary to keep them alive. Confined to the provender even their shepherds would have them contented withal, many would die. Sometimes, to escape from the arid wastes of "society," haunted with the cries of its spiritual greengrocers, and find the pasture on which their souls can live, they have to die, and climb the grassy slopes of the heavenly hills.

Barbara had as yet had no experience of pain--or of more at least than came from sympathy with suffering--a sympathy which, though ready, could hardly be deep in one who had never had a headache herself. To all dumb suffering things, she was very gentle and pitiful; but her pity was like that of a child over her doll.

She was always glad to get away from home. While her father was paying his long-delayed visit to the rector, she was flying over hedge and ditch and rail, in a line for that gate of Mortgrange which Simon Armour and his grandson found open when first the former took the latter to see the place: Barbara had a key to it.