"Jim, you provoking creature, you mustn't talk so."
"Bless your heart, who is talking so? Am I saying anything? Of course I'm not saying anything. Alice won't let me. I always have to shut my eyes and look the other way when Angie and St. John are around, for fear I should say something and make a remark. Jim says nothing, but he thinks all the more."
Now, we'll venture to say that there isn't a happy young wife in the first months of wifehood that isn't predisposed to hope for all her friends a happy marriage, as about the summit of human bliss; and so Eva was not shocked like Alice by the suggestion that her rector might become a candidate for the sacrament of matrimony. On the contrary, it occurred to her at once that the pretty, practical, lively, efficient little Angie might be a true angel, not merely of church and Sunday-school, but of a rector's house. He was ideal and theoretic, and she practical and common-sense; yet she was pretty enough, and picturesque, and fanciful enough for an ideal man to make a poem of, and weave webs around, and write sonnets to; and as all these considerations flashed at once upon Eva's mind, she went on settling a spray of geranium with rose-buds, a pleased dreamy smile on her face. After a moment's pause, she said:
"Jim, if you see a bird considering whether to build a nest in the tree by your window, and want him there, the way is to keep pretty still about it and not go to the window, and watch, and call people, saying, 'Oh, see here, there's a bird going to build!' Don't you see the sense of my parable?"
"Well, why do you talk to me? Haven't I kept away from the window, and walked round on tip-toe like a cat, and only given the quietest look out of the corner of my eye?"
"Well, it seems you couldn't help calling my attention and Alice's. Don't extend the circle of observers, Jim."
"See if I do. You'll find me discretion itself. I shall be so quiet that even a humming bird's nerves couldn't be disturbed. Well, good by, for the present."
"Oh, but, Jim, don't forget to do what you can about Maggie. It really seems selfish in me to be absorbed in my own affairs, and not doing anything to help Mary, poor thing, when she's so good to me."
"Well, I don't see but you are doing all you can. I'll see about it right away and report to you," said Jim; "so, au revoir."
Angie came in about lunch time; the two sisters, once at their tea and toast, discussed the forthcoming evening's preparations and the Christmas Sunday-school operations: and Eva, with the light of Jim's suggestions in her mind, began to observe certain signs of increasing intimacy between Angie and Mr. St. John.