Mary cheerfully gathered up her thread, scissors, and ruffling, and the two stepped over the window-sill, and soon found themselves seated cozily under the boughs of a large apple-tree, whose descending branches, meeting the tops of the high grass all around, formed a perfect seclusion, as private as heart could desire.
They sat down, pushing away a place in the grass; and Cerinthy Ann took off her bonnet, and threw it among the clover, exhibiting to view her glossy black hair, always trimly arranged in shining braids, except where some curls fell over the rich, high colour of her cheeks. Something appeared to discompose her this afternoon; there were those evident signs of a consultation impending, which to an experienced eye are as unmistakeable as the coming up of a shower in summer.
Cerinthy began by passionately demolishing several heads of clover, remarking as she did so that ‘she didn’t see, for her part, how Mary could keep so calm when things were coming so near;’ and as Mary answered to this only with a quiet smile, she broke out again:—
‘I don’t see, for my part, how a young girl could marry a minister anyhow; but then I think you are just cut out for it. But what would anybody say if I should do such a thing?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mary, innocently.
‘Well, I suppose everybody would hold up their hands; and yet if I do say it myself,’ she added, colouring, ‘there are not many girls who could make a better minister’s wife than I could if I had a mind to try.’
‘That I am sure of,’ said Mary, warmly.
‘I guess you are the only one that ever thought so,’ said Cerinthy, giving an impatient toss; ‘there’s father all the while mourning over me, and mother too, and yet I don’t see but that I do pretty much all that is done in the house. And they say I am a great comfort in a temporal point of view; but oh! the groanings and the sighings that there are over me!
‘I don’t think it is pleasant to think that your best friends are thinking such awful things about you when you are working your fingers off to help them; it is kind o’ discouraging, but I don’t know what to do about it;’ and for a few moments Cerinthy sat demolishing buttercups and throwing them up in the air, till her shiny black head was covered with golden flakes, while her cheek grew redder with something that she was going to say next.
‘Now, Mary, there is that creature; well—you know—he won’t take “no” for an answer. What shall I do?’