Then came supper; and after that, for the first time in her life, Joan was present when a man had the presumption to speak to his Maker direct from his own heart, without the mediation of a book.

This she found odder than all the rest; she had never even heard of such a thing! So peculiar, so unfathomable were his utterances, that it never occurred to her the man might be meaning something; farther from her still was the thought, that perhaps God liked to hear him, was listening to him and understanding him, and would give him the things he asked.

She heard only an extraordinary gibberish, supposed suitable to a religious observance--family prayers, she thought it must be! She felt confused, troubled, ashamed--so grievously out of her element that she never knew until they rose, that the rest were kneeling while she sat staring into the fire.
Then she felt guilty and shy, but as nobody took any notice, persuaded herself they had not observed.

The unpleasantness of all this, however, did not prevent her from saying to herself as she went to bed, "Oh, how delightful it would be to live in a house where everybody understood, and loved, and thought about everybody else!" She did not know that she was wishing for nothing more, and something a little less, than the kingdom of heaven--the very thing she thought the laird and Cosmo so strange for troubling their heads about.

If men's wishes are not always for what the kingdom of heaven would bring them, their miseries at least are all for the lack of that kingdom.
That night Joan dreamed herself in a desert island, where she had to go through great hardships, but where everybody was good to everybody, and never thought of taking care except of each other; and that, when a beautiful ship came to carry her away, she cried, and would not go.
Three weeks of all kinds of weather, except warm, followed, ending with torrents of rain, and a rapid thaw; but before that time Joan had got as careless of the weather as Cosmo, and nothing delighted her more than to encounter any sort of it with him.