“'Blaw the wind ne'er so fast, it will lown at the last'” quoted Erica, smiling. “Equally true, PADRE MIO.”
“Yes, dear,” he said quietly, “but not in my life time. You see if I let this pass, the lies will be circulated, and they'll say I can't contradict them. If I bring an action against the fellow, people will say I do it to flaunt my opinions in the face of the public. As your hero Livingstone once remarked, 'Isn't it interesting to get blamed for everything?' However, we must make the best of it. How about the new house? When can we settle in? I feel a longing for that study with its twenty-two feet o' length for pacing!”
“What are your engagements?” she asked, taking up a book from the table. “Eleventh, Newcastle; 12th, Nottingham; 13th and 14th, Plymouth. Let me see, that will bring you home on Monday, the 15th, and will leave us three clear days to get things straight; that will do capitally.”
“And you'll be sure to see that the books are carefully moved,” said Raeburn. “I can't have the markers displaced.”
Erica laughed. Her father had a habit of putting candle lighters in his books to mark places for references, and the appearance of the book shelves all bristling with them had long been a family joke, more especially as, if a candle lighter happened to be wanted for its proper purpose, there was never one to be found.
“I will pack them myself,” she said.
CHAPTER XXXI. Brian as Avenger
A paleness took the poet's cheek;
“Must I drink here?” he seemed to seek
The lady's will with utterance meek.
“Ay, ay,” she said, “it so must be,”
(And this time she spake cheerfully)
“Behooves thee know world's cruelty.” E. B. Browning
The trial of Luke Raeburn, on the charge of having published a blasphemous libel in a pamphlet entitled “Bible Miracles,” came on in the Court of Queen's Bench early in December. It excited a great deal of interest. Some people hoped that the revival of an almost obsolete law would really help to check the spread of heterodox views, and praised Mr. Pogson for his energy and religious zeal. These were chiefly well-meaning folks, not much given to the study of precedents. Some people of a more liberal turn read the pamphlet in question, and were surprised to see that matter quite as heterodox might be found in many high-class reviews which lay about on drawing room tables, the only difference being that the articles in the reviews were written in somewhat ambiguous language by fashionable agnostics, and that “Bible Miracles” was a plain, blunt, sixpenny tract, avowedly written for the people by the people's tribune.