Volume Two—Chapter Two.
Miss Heathery’s Offering.
Nature, or rather the adaptation from Nature which we call civilisation, deals very hardly with unmarried ladies of twenty-five for the next ten or a dozen years. Then it seems to give them up, and we have arrived at what is politely known as the uncertain age. Very uncertain it is, for, from thirty-five to forty-five some ladies seem to stand still.
Miss Heathery was one of these, and the mid-life stage seemed to have made her evergreen, for seven years’ lapse found her much the same, scarcely in any manner changed.
Poor Miss Heathery! For twenty years she had been longing with all the intensity of a true woman to become somebody’s squaw. Her heart was an urn full of sweetness. Perhaps it was of rather a sickly cloying kind that many men would have turned from with disgust, but it was sweetness all the same, and for these long, long years she had been waiting to pour this honey of her nature like a blessing upon some one’s head, while only one man had been ready to say, “Pour on,” and held his head ready.
That one would-be suitor was old Gemp, and when he said it, poor Miss Heathery recoiled, clasping her hands tightly upon the mouth of the urn and closing it. She could not pour it there, and the love of Gemp had turned into a bitter hate.
If the curate in his disappointment would only have turned to her, she sighed to herself!
“Ah!”