"It's the ribbon on your hat," went on Rachel. "What pretty colors! Are they your husband's school or college?"
"No," said Morna, blushing as she laughed again. "No, they're my own college colors."
Rachel stood still on the grass.
"Have you really been at college?" said she; but her tone was so obviously one of envy that Morna, who was delightfully sensitive about her learning, did not even think of the short answer which she sometimes returned to the astonished queries of the intellectually vulgar, but admitted the impeachment with another laugh.
"Now, don't say you wouldn't have thought it of me," she added, "and don't say you would!"
"I am far too jealous to say anything at all," Rachel answered with a flattering stare. "And do you mean to tell me that you took a degree?"
"Of sorts," admitted Morna, whose spoken English was by no means undefiled. But it turned out to have been a mathematical degree; and when, under sympathetic pressure, Morna vouchsafed particulars, even Rachel knew enough to appreciate the honors which the vicar's wife had won. What was more difficult to understand was how so young a woman of such distinguished attainments could be content to hide her light under the bushel of a country vicarage; and Rachel could not resist some expression of her wonderment on that point.
"Did you do nothing with it all," she asked, "before you married?"
"No," said Morna; "you see, I got engaged in the middle of it, and the week after the lists came out we were married."
"What a career to have given up!"