"Oh, no," he responded, with more eagerness than the occasion called for; "I didn't mean that."
She smiled again, a smile which seemed to him nothing less than adorable, and yet which teased him a little, although he could not tell why. She took up the novel which lay in her lap.
"Have you read this?" she inquired.
He shook his head.
"You forget," he answered, "that I am a deacon. At the Clergy House we do not read novels."
"How little you must know of life," returned she.
There was a silence of some moments. The train rushed on, past fields desolate under patches of snow, and stark, leafless trees; over rivers dotted with cakes of grimy ice; between banks of frost-gnawed rock. The landscape in the dim January afternoon was gray and gloomy; and as day declined everything became more lorn and forbidding. Maurice turned away from the window, and sighed.
"How disconsolate the country looks!" said he. "I am country bred, and I don't know that I ever thought of the sadness of it; but now if I see the country in winter it makes me sigh for the people who have to live there all the year round."
"But they don't notice it any more than you did when you lived in it."
"Perhaps not; but it seems to me as if they must. At any rate they must feel the effects of it, whether they are conscious of it or not."