For fully ten minutes there was a dead silence. Where upon the pastor put on his overcoat and cap, and went toward the door.
The whole evening he had been trying to find words with which to prove to Storm that he was not only doing harm to the pastor with this undertaking, but he was undermining the parish. Although thoughts and words kept crowding into his head, he could neither arrange them into an orderly sequence nor give utterance to them, because he was a broken man. Walking toward the door, he espied Gertrude sitting in her corner playing with her blocks and bits of glass. He stopped and looked at her. Evidently she had not heard a word of the conversation, for her eyes sparkled with delight and her cheeks were like fresh-blown roses.
The pastor was startled at the sight of all this innocent happiness of the child in contrast to his own heart heaviness.
"What are you making?" he asked, and went up to her.
The little girl had got through with her parish long before that; in fact, she had already pulled it down and started something new.
"If you had only come a minute sooner!" exclaimed the child. "I had made such a beautiful parish, with both church and schoolhouse—"
"But where is it now?"
"Oh, I've destroyed the parish, and now I'm building a Jerusalem, and—"
"What?" interrupted the parson. "Have you destroyed the parish in order to build a Jerusalem?"
"Yes," said Gertrude, "and it was such a fine parish! But we read about Jerusalem yesterday in school, and now I have pulled down the parish to build a Jerusalem."