“Both, am I not first lady in Dole?”
“You are First and Only Queen of my heart,” he said tenderly. “That’s your name and title.”
And just then Sally came to say the table was ready, and slipping away from his encircling arms Vashti led the way to the table.
As the afternoon waned, Sidney’s nervousness increased. He strove to remember his sermon, and wandered restlessly about the house. At length he came to Vashti where she sat, book in hand, but busy with her own thoughts.
“I’m really worried over the people leaving so to-day,” he said. “Can it be that they are disappointed in me?”
“Why, no,” said Vashti, then asking a question which had been on the tip of her tongue all day: “Can’t you remember anything of your sermon?”
“Not a word,” said Sidney, “isn’t it strange?”
“Oh, it’s just a freak of memory,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t mind that,” said Sidney, “but the worrying part is that I seem to remember that I was harsh, that I said cruel things and used the facts you have told me about their own lives to drive in the nails of a cruel argument. Did I do that? Oh, Vashti, tell me. I spoke, it seemed to me, filled with your spirit, so surely I could not have been brutal to them. It is an evil dream.”
His pale face was strained with the pain of his thoughts. Vashti was alarmed by the distress upon his countenance. She rose and took him by the hand.