A week passed, during which all had been very quiet at the Rectory, brother and sister meeting each other hour by hour in a kind of saddened calm. The Reverend Arthur was paler than usual, almost cadaverous, while there was a troubled, anxious look in little Miss Rosebury’s eyes, and a sharpness in her voice that was not there on the day when Dr Bolter proposed.
No news had been heard of the young ladies at Miss Twettenham’s; and Dr Bolter, to Miss Rosebury’s sorrow, had not written to her brother.
But she bravely fought down her suffering, busying herself with more than usual zeal in home and parish; while the Reverend Arthur came back evening after evening faint, weary, and haggard, from some long botanical ramble.
The eighth day had arrived, and towards noon little Miss Rosebury was quietly seated by the open window with her work, fallen upon her knee, and a sad expression in her eyes as she gazed wistfully along the road, thinking, truth to tell, that Dr Bolter might perhaps come in to their early dinner.
Doctors were so seldom ill, or perhaps he might be lying suffering at some hotel.
The thought sent a pang through the little body, making her start, and seizing her needle, begin to work, when a warm flush came into her cheeks as she heard at one and the same time the noise of wheels, and a slow, heavy step upon the gravel.
The step she well knew, and for a few moments she did not look up; but when she did she uttered an exclamation.
“Tut—tut—tut!” she said. “If anyone saw poor Arthur now they would think him mad.”
Certainly the long, gaunt figure of the Reverend Arthur Rosebury, in his soft, shapeless felt hat, and long, clinging, shabby black alpaca coat, was very suggestive of his being a kind of male Ophelia gone slightly distraught as the consequence of a disappointment in love.
For in the heat of a long walk the tie of his white cravat had gone round towards the nape of his neck, while his felt hat was decorated to the crown with butterflies secured to it by pins. The band had wild flowers and herbs tucked in here and there. His umbrella—a very shabby, baggy gingham—was closed and stuffed with botanical treasures; and his vasculum, slung beneath one arm, was so gorged with herbs and flowers of the field that it would not close.