CHAPTER XVIII.
The Doctor sat at his study-table. It was evening, and the slant beams of the setting sun shot their golden arrows through the healthy purple clusters of lilacs that veiled the windows. There had been a shower that filled them with drops of rain, which every now and then tattooed with a slender rat-tat on the window-sill, as a breeze would shake the leaves and bear in perfume on its wings. Sweet, fragrance-laden airs tripped stirringly to and fro about the study-table, making gentle confusions, fluttering papers on moral ability, agitating treatises on the great end of creation, mixing up subtile distinctions between amiable instincts and true holiness, and, in short, conducting themselves like very unappreciative and unphilosophical little breezes.
A Doubt about the “Evidences.”
The Doctor patiently smoothed back and rearranged, while opposite to him sat Mary, bending over some copying she was doing for him. One stray sunbeam fell on her light-brown hair, tinging it to gold; her long, drooping lashes lay over the wax-like pink of her cheeks, as she wrote on.
‘Mary,’ said the Doctor, pushing the papers from him.
‘Sir,’ she answered, looking up, the blood just perceptibly rising in her cheeks.
‘Do you ever have any periods in which your evidences seem not altogether clear?’
Nothing could show more forcibly the grave, earnest character of thought in New England at this time than the fact that this use of the term ‘evidences’ had become universally significant and understood as relating to one’s right of citizenship in a celestial, invisible commonwealth.