“It is, perhaps,” said the rector.
There was a slight pause; then the gentleman rose. “A lovely evening,” said he. “I think, Sophia, I will stroll down the park and meet the coach on its return.”
“My dear doctor, after dinner rest awhile.”
“I am pining, Sophia, for that rapee—or did I say macabaw? There’s not a pinch, not a pinch.”
As he passed out into the little garden, he said to himself:
“I am growing positively Machiavelian!” And thereat the abandoned rector breathed in the soft air, luxuriously.
It was a lovely evening, as he had said. September had been drifting on, in peace and suavity; and, this day, summer seemed to pause and watch the coming of inevitable autumn as a beautiful woman pauses and looks down the hill of life with a sweet resignation that lends her a new pathetic charm, unknown to the pride of her June or even to the exquisite promise of her April. The light was golden-yellow over the grass, where the shadows of the elms lay long. Now and then an early-withered leaf crackled under the parson’s foot. The rooks were cawing for their last muster of the day; the kine were lowing towards far-off byres. There was a tramp of feet along the road without the walls and the distant sound of voices. The whole air was full of the music of evening home-comings. A sense of peace descended on the good man’s soul, he bared his grey-crowned head and looked up at the placid sky, and felt a kind of faith in happiness.
It was to him as if the striving, the heat and the burden of the day had passed from their lives, and God’s best gift, rest, was about to be bestowed at last.
Even as he was drawing near the gates, Ellinor was alighting from the coach, pale, tired, anxious-eyed, followed by a dusty Barnaby, who carried under his arm a cross Belphegor. They hurried through the wicket into the green arms of the park. Obedient to his mistress’s gesture, the dumb boy with his burden struck immediately across the grass towards the rectory, while she paused to draw a deep breath and taste for a spell the sad delight of being once more in that beloved enclosure, which had been, and was still, all the world to her.
Presently she was startled to find the reverend Horatio at her side.