Many of her husband's religious idiosyncrasies were amusing to her.
At the same time she liked to see this sympathetic interest he was taking in the child's upbringing.
If he were only not so hard, so narrow at times.
He made himself a torment to himself and to every one else.
On the earliest bright morning of returning spring he was wont to take her for her first little journeys in the world. "Come, now," he would say, "we will go for a little walk."
"Walk," chirped Vesta.
"Yes, walk," echoed Gerhardt.
Mrs. Gerhardt would fasten on one of her little hoods, for in these days Jennie kept Vesta's wardrobe beautifully replete.
Taking her by the hand, Gerhardt would issue forth, satisfied to drag first one foot and then the other in order to accommodate his gait to her toddling steps.
One beautiful May day, when Vesta was four years old, they started on one of their walks.
Everywhere nature was budding and bourgeoning; the birds twittering their arrival from the south; the insects making the best of their brief span of life.
Sparrows chirped in the road; robins strutted upon the grass; bluebirds built in the eaves of the cottages.
Gerhardt took a keen delight in pointing out the wonders of nature to Vesta, and she was quick to respond.
Every new sight and sound interested her.
"Ooh!—ooh!" exclaimed Vesta, catching sight of a low, flashing touch of red as a robin lighted upon a twig nearby.
Her hand was up, and her eyes were wide open.
"Yes," said Gerhardt, as happy as if he himself had but newly discovered this marvelous creature.
"Robin.
Bird.
Robin.
Say robin."
"Wobin," said Vesta.
"Yes, robin," he answered.
"It is going to look for a worm now.
We will see if we cannot find its nest.
I think I saw a nest in one of these trees."
He plodded peacefully on, seeking to rediscover an old abandoned nest that he had observed on a former walk.
"Here it is," he said at last, coming to a small and leafless tree, in which a winter-beaten remnant of a home was still clinging.
"Here, come now, see," and he lifted the baby up at arm's length. "See," said Gerhardt, indicating the wisp of dead grasses with his free hand, "nest.
That is a bird's nest.
See!"
"Ooh!" repeated Vesta, imitating his pointing finger with one of her own.
"Ness—ooh!"
"Yes," said Gerhardt, putting her down again.
"That was a wren's nest.
They have all gone now.
They will not come any more."
Still further they plodded, he unfolding the simple facts of life, she wondering with the wide wonder of a child. When they had gone a block or two he turned slowly about as if the end of the world had been reached.
"We must be going back!" he said.
And so she had come to her fifth year, growing in sweetness, intelligence, and vivacity.
Gerhardt was fascinated by the questions she asked, the puzzles she pronounced.
"Such a girl!" he would exclaim to his wife.
"What is it she doesn't want to know?
'Where is God?
What does He do?
Where does He keep His feet?" she asks me.
"I gotta laugh sometimes."
From rising in the morning, to dress her to laying her down at night after she had said her prayers, she came to be the chief solace and comfort of his days.
Without Vesta, Gerhardt would have found his life hard indeed to bear.
CHAPTER XXVII For three years now Lester had been happy in the companionship of Jennie.