He listened with a curious smile. "A bit advanced, my lady, for all your orthodoxy. You best not tell your views abroad."
"My views are for myself, alone. We women are supposed to have none—to stay put, as it were—and I am going to stay put; but I shall think what I please." She shrugged her shoulders, and laughed. "Goodness! what turned the talk to religion—neither of us has any to speak of."
"And, hence, we may safely discuss it without offense to either—it is believers only who are intolerants."
She held up her hands in protest. "No more, I thank you. Let us find a pleasanter topic.... I heard you were leaving us very soon—for Philadelphia. Is it so?"
"This is the first I knew of it. Who told you?"
She affected to think. "I, really, cannot remember. Some one, in Annapolis, but who it was I do not know."
"Because it interested you so little."
"No—because I thought you would have told me, were it true. Yet, why should you not be moving on—one does not visit America to see only one place?"
"No, I suppose not; I must move on, sometime, but I am in no haste, I assure you. I came to America, intending to loiter indefinitely." There was a queer smile on his face. He was thinking of his father's parting admonition.
She did not observe the smile—and it would have conveyed nothing to her if she had. She was occupied with his words. "Intending to loiter indefinitely" did not smack of a wife, left behind in England—unless—unless the wife were the cause of his indefinite loiter.