Watching Part 2

The doctor had given him a few books to bring away with him, and lying in his hammock at night, he would try and shut out the den and stench of the lower cockpit and read. He did not take in very much, but every now and then some lovely phrase would shine up at him from the page, as though it were a pin prick in a dark curtain, letting in the light. When vile things happened outside himself, he now always managed to find something to pay attention to besides the vileness–the flash of fine anger in one man's eyes when another was flogged at the gangway, the sudden gleam of moonlight through a rent torn in the clouds by the frenzy of a storm...

-Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill,206.

Watching Part 1

For a moment or two they enjoyed the delicate innuendo and elegant reparatee of the art of conversation in which they had been trained, meanwhile watching, without appearing to do so, the gradual unfolding of this hour placed like a flower in their hands. For such was unconsciously the attitude of both of them towards the new phase of each day – it was not unimportant, it had some new discovery hidden within it for the finding. It was the attitude of the trained mind collecting the evidence, in their case for the Christian thesis that all things, somehow, work together for good.

-Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill, 196