“Parker told me you were somewhere about. Women always give themselves so much trouble before they can do anything comfortable, that I knew I should find you at the highest point of the place.”
He came straggling up, and stretched himself on the grass with an air of contentment. The lark had finished its song, and dropped silently into the grass; the wind was freshening, blowing back Winifred’s hair, and stirring her face into colour;—everything was full of delicious, strong beauty. Winifred looked down at her cousin and smiled, perhaps at the sight of his brown, good-tempered eyes.
“Now that you are come, you shall tell us what you have been doing,” she said, not sorry to lead Marion’s thoughts away from the road of unavailing regrets.
“Doing? I have been walking through the mud. That is what you all do here always, isn’t it? I met an old woman who told me a great deal more about cider than I ever knew before, and a man—O, by the way, Winifred, that is what I wanted to ask you—who is a short man, rather deformed, with a powerful face, and strong religious opinions?”
“It must have been David Stephens, Anthony’s bugbear,” said Winifred.
Other people’s bugbears often strike one curiously in an opposite light. Frank repeated the word a little wonderingly.
“He is a dissenter,” said Marion, beginning to listen. “He actually wanted to build a chapel in Thorpe, and had almost got that stupid old Maddox to let him have the field by the church. Luckily Anthony found it out, and stopped it. I dare say he hates him for it.”
“Poor fellow!” said Frank kindly, while Marion stared at him. “One can soon see he is a dissenter. There is nothing very original in his opinions, either, so far as they go: he has got hold of the usual distortion of facts. But it was the intensity of the man’s convictions which impressed me. In these days it is something even to be a fanatic.”
“Every one says he is a most mischievous agitator,” persisted Marion, eagerly. “We are quite unhappy because our maid—Faith Stokes—has allowed herself to be engaged to him. Her father is gardener at the Red House. All her family dislike it.”
“She will stick to him,” asserted Captain Orde. “He is the very man to get a hold over a woman. Unless he himself gives her up. If I don’t mistake him, he would neither let his own happiness nor another person’s stand in the way of what he imagined to be his work,—perhaps not even his own conscience.”