The girl was not happy. Channing had certainly left his mark.
"Damn the fellow!" said Philip to himself, most unclerically; and his anger did not cool with time.
He redoubled his tender care of Jacqueline; considerate of every mood, constantly praising and encouraging her, daily planning little surprises for her pleasure (the puppy had been one of them); doing everything possible, in fact, except make love to her. That would have been possible, too, for she was very sweet, a true daughter of Helen; and he a young and normal man, sorely in need of comforting. But guessing what he did of the girl's heart, he would not have offered her the indignity of unwelcome love-making.
"It is just like being married to a dear big brother," Jacqueline explained naïvely to her mother. "Philip is the best friend in the world!"
"I know. He would be, dear fellow," Kate replied, well content, remembering with a sudden shudder, despite the years which had passed, a husband who had never been a friend to her.
Kate was seeing very little of her new son-in-law in those days. Often as she came to the rectory—and she had formed the habit of dropping in once or twice a day on her way to and from her lonely house—she rarely found Philip at home.
"What does he find to do that keeps him so busy these winter days?" she marveled.
"Oh, sick parishioners, and ailing cows, and things like that. He's always tearing about on horseback, or making long journeys somewhere in the Ark—I wish Jemmy had never given it to him! He manages to find duties that keep him out of doors just as long as there's any daylight to see by. And as if that weren't enough, he has fixed up the choir-room over at the church for a sort of study, because he says he can't write sermons with me about—I'm too distracting! Did you ever hear such nonsense? When I sit just as quiet as a mouse, and don't do a thing but watch him, or perhaps sit on a foot-stool beside him and hold the hand he isn't using. You don't need both hands to write a sermon!"
Kate laughed at the picture, looking at her daughter with a fond maternal eye. She could understand that the girl might be somewhat distracting, in her demure little house-dress turned in at the soft throat, and her hair done neatly on top of her head as became a matron, but escaping about her face in glinting chestnut tendrils.
"I suspect it is rather difficult to be a spiritual pastor and master and an attentive bridegroom at the same time," she commented.