“Well, then, let me but take my knitting”—
“No. You shall do naught but listen, and you shall sit where you are! For once I’ll have your whole mind”—
“For once, Myles!”
“Ay, for once,—look as grieved as you may out of those eyen of yours! Well enough do you know that Alick, and little Myles, and now Mistress Lora have well-nigh pushed their poor old dad out of their mother’s heart”—
“Myles! Dost really think it, love?”
The captain held his wife as far from him as her seat upon his knee would allow, and eagerly read her fair troubled face, her tender blushes, quivering lips, and lovely, loving eyes, where the tears stood and yet were restrained from falling—read and read as men devour with incredulous eyes some voucher of almost incredible good fortune. Then he slowly said,—
“Truly God has been very good to me, my wife. His name be praised.”
It was a rare aspiration from those bearded lips, not innocent of the strange oaths and fierce objurgation well known to the soldiery of that day,—‘our army in Flanders,’—and over Barbara’s face came a look of such joy and peace as transformed its quiet comeliness to true beauty. But it was she who with woman’s tact dropped a veil over that moment’s exaltation before it should degenerate into commonplace.
“What is your plan, dear?” asked she, and her husband, with a half-conscious feeling of relief, drew a long breath, and said,—
“Oh—yes. Well, Bab, I, as well as you, would be content to live a little farther from some of our townsfolk; it is not here as it was at first, or even when you came. Then we were all of one mind and one interest, and if I could not belong to their church as they call it, at least I respected their beliefs, and they let mine alone. But now, amid all this bickering with Lyford and Oldhame”—