‘I wish I had not spoilt the visit,’ she said, wistfully, at last.
‘We shall see you again, and we shall know each other better,’ he said, kindly. ‘You are my godchild now, Sophy, and you know that I must remember you constantly in prayer.’
‘Yes,’ she faintly said.
‘And will you promise me to try my remedy? I think it will soften your heart to the graces of the Blessed Comforter. And even if all seems gloom within, look out, see others happy, try to rejoice with them, and peace will come in! Now, goodbye, my dear godchild, and the God of Peace bless you, and give you rest.
CHAPTER XII.
Mr. Dusautoy had given notice of the day of the Confirmation, when Mr. Kendal called his wife.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘my dear, whether Sophia can spare you to take a walk with me before church.’
Sophy, who was well aware that a walk with him was the greatest and rarest treat to his wife, gave gracious permission, and in a few minutes they were walking by the bright canal-side, under the calm evening sunshine and deep blue sky of early autumn.
Mr. Kendal said not a word, and Albinia, leaning on his arm, listened, as it were, to the stillness, or rather to the sounds that marked it—the gurgling of the little streams let off into the water-courses in the meadows; the occasional plunge of the rat from the banks, the sounds from the town, softened by distance, and the far-off cawings of the rooks, which she could just see wheeling about as little black specks over the plantations of Woodside, or watching the swallows assembling for departure sitting in long ranks, like an ornament along the roof of a neighbouring barn.