“Is that because I am not deep, or because the plough has been at work?” she asked. “In neither case I am not sure you are right.”
“Thee is happily married,” he said reflectively; “and the prospect is fair.”
“I think you know my husband,” she said in answer, and yet not in answer.
“I was born in Hamley where he has a place—thee has been there?” he asked eagerly.
“Not yet. We are to go next Sunday, for the first time to the Cloistered House. I had not heard that my husband knew you, until I saw in the paper a few days ago that your home was in Hamley. Then I asked Eglington, and he told me that your family and his had been neighbours for generations.”
“His father was a Quaker,” David rejoined, “but he forsook the faith.”
“I did not know,” she answered, with some hesitation. There was no reason why, when she and Eglington had talked of Hamley, he should not have said his own father had once been a Quaker; yet she had dwelt so upon the fact that she herself had Quaker blood, and he had laughed so much over it, with the amusement of the superior person, that his silence on this one point struck her now with a sense of confusion.
“You are going to Hamley—we shall meet there?” she continued.
“To-day I should have gone, but I have business at the Foreign Office to-morrow. One needs time to learn that all ‘private interests and partial affections’ must be sacrificed to public duty.”
“But you are going soon? You will be there on Sunday?”