“There’s no need for me to go abroad dear, I shall be all right if I can look after myself and get into the air.”
“I expect you will. Everything’s happened just right hasn’t it?”
“It’s all been in the hands of an ’igher power, dear.”
Miriam found herself chafing again. It had all rushed on, in a few minutes. It was out of her hands completely now. She did not want to know Mr. and Mrs. Taunton. There was nothing to hold her any longer. She had seen Miss Dear in the new part. To watch the working out of it, to hear about the parish, sudden details about people she did not know—intolerable.
CHAPTER XXXII
1
The short figure looked taller in the cassock, funny and hounded, like all curates; pounding about and arranging a place for her and trying to collect his thoughts while he repeated how good it was of her to have come. He sat down at last to the poached eggs and tea laid on one end of the small book-crowded table.
“I have a service at four-thirty” he said busily eating and glaring in front of him with unseeing eyes, a little like Mr. Grove only less desperate because his dark head was round and his eyes were blue—“so you must excuse my meal. I have a volume of Plato here.”
“Oh yes” said Miriam doubtfully.
“Are you familiar with Plato?”