"Yes," said Madam Van Ruypen, folding her long hands in her lap. She sat at one corner of her library fire, in a carved high-backed chair, and the young minister at the other end. Both were regarding the leaping flames.
"It will be best for you to return home to-morrow; tell the mother all my plans for the children, and ask her permission for me to put them into school," went on the old lady, not raising her gaze from the crackling hickory logs.
"Yes, Madam Van Ruypen," said the minister.
"And then write me at once what she says. Meantime, I shall be consulting Mr. King as to the school. It has to be a peculiar kind, of course, none of the high-fangled ones, but a good, substantial, ordinary sort of one, dominated by a man with a conscience. And where shall we find such an one—goodness knows, I'm sure I don't," she lifted her hands in dismay.
Mr. St. John, seeing that something was expected of him, volunteered the remark, "Oh, there must be such institutions; they are so much needed."
"Just like a minister," retorted the old lady, who was nothing if not blunt, especially if it fell out that she took a liking to a body; so now she added, "Oh, you'll do to preach from a desk; but as to practical things, such as the selection of a school, why, what can you, in the name of sense, be expected to know, either about them or the masters who run them?"
A little spot of red began to show itself on the fair cheek, and twice the young minister opened his mouth. But he thought better of it. Then he laughed. "Perhaps so," he said, with a nod, and stretched his hands to the blaze.
Madam Van Ruypen laughed too. Having never meant to give offence, that danger had not occurred to her. But she had been suddenly overcome, as it were, with a mortal terror, and all on account of those mountain children. What to do with them now she had sent for them she had found herself unable to answer. She couldn't send them back home, that would be cruelty indeed; and until the plan for the school popped up she was in a miserable state enough. So it was quite cheery to hear the bright little laugh bubble out from the other end of the fireplace, and she laughed so heartily in echo, that Mr. St. John tried it again.
"Well, now I feel better," she said, wiping her eyes with her lace-trimmed handkerchief. "You can't know, Mr. St. John, how very much I have been tried in this matter."
"I suppose so," he said, the laugh dropping away. Really, when he came to think of it again, the wonder grew how she came to do this thing at all, and then, how she dared to keep on so bravely. And that recalled "old money-bags"; how he blamed himself now for calling her so in his thoughts on those Sundays in the little mountain parish church! Could she be the same person as this woman, wiping her eyes, so touched by the little cheer he had given to her perplexity? He cleared his throat. "It was noble of you," he said, his own eyes glistening.