How prettily Anna had looked to him during those memorable days, so much prettier than the other young girls of his flock, whose hair was tumbled ere the day’s work was done, and whose dresses were soiled and disordered; while hers was always so tidy and neat, and the braids of her chestnut hair were always so smooth and bright. How well, too, he remembered that brief ten minutes, when, in the dusky twilight which had crept so early into the church, he stood alone with her and talked, he did not know of what, only that he heard her voice replying to him, and saw the changeful color on her cheek as she looked modestly into his face. That was a week of delicious happiness, and the rector had lived it over many times, wondering if, when the next Christmas came, it would find him any nearer to Anna Ruthven than the last had left him.
“It must,” he suddenly exclaimed. “The matter shall be settled before she leaves Hanover with Mrs. Meredith. My claim is superior to Thornton’s, and he shall not take her from me. I’ll write what I lack the courage to tell her, and to-morrow I will call and deliver it myself.”
An hour later, and there was lying in the rector’s desk a letter, in which he had told Anna Ruthven how much he loved her, and had asked her to be his wife. Something whispered that she would not refuse him, and with this hope to buoy him up, his two miles’ walk that warm afternoon was neither warm nor tiresome, and the old lady by whose bedside he read and prayed was surprised to hear him as he left her door, whistling an old love-tune which she, too, had known and sang fifty years before.
CHAPTER II.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON.
Mrs. Julia Meredith had arrived, and the brown farm-house was in a state of unusual excitement; not that Captain Humphreys or his good wife, Aunt Ruth, respected very highly the great lady who so seldom honored them with her presence, and who always tried to impress them with a sense of her superiority, and the mighty favor she conferred upon them by occasionally condescending to bring her aristocratic presence into their quiet, plain household, and turn it topsy-turvy. Still she was Anna’s aunt, and then it was a distinction which Aunt Ruth rather enjoyed,—that of having a fashionable city woman for her guest,—and so she submitted with a good grace to the breaking in upon all her customs, and uttered no word of complaint when the breakfast-table waited till eight, and sometimes nine o’clock, and the freshest eggs were taken from the nest, and the cream all skimmed from the pans to gratify the lady who came very charming and pretty in her handsome cambric wrapper, with rose-buds in her hair. She had arrived the previous night, and while the rector was penning his letter, she was running her eye rapidly over Anna’s face and form, making an inventory of her charms, and calculating their value.
“A very graceful figure, neither too short nor too tall. This she gets from the Ruthvens. Splendid eyes and magnificent hair, when Valencia has once taken it in hand. Complexion a little too brilliant, but a few weeks of dissipation will cure that. Fine teeth, and features tolerably regular, except that the mouth is too wide and the forehead too low, which defects she takes from the Humphreys. Small feet and rather pretty hands, except that they seem to have grown wide since I saw her before. Can it be these horrid people have set her to milking the cows?”
These were Mrs. Meredith’s thoughts that first evening after her arrival at the farm-house, and she had not materially changed her mind when the next afternoon she went with Anna down to the Glen, for which she affected a great fondness, because she thought it was romantic and girlish to do so, and she was far from having passed the period when women cease caring for youth and its appurtenances. She had criticised Anna’s taste in dress,—had said that the belt she selected did not harmonize with the color of the muslin she wore, and suggested that a frill of lace about the neck would be softer and more becoming than the stiff white linen collar.
“But in the country it does not matter,” she added. “Wait till I get you to New York, under Madam Blank’s supervision, and then we shall see a transformation such as will astonish the Hanoverians.”
This was up in Anna’s room; and when the Glen was reached Mrs. Meredith continued the conversation, telling Anna of her plans for taking her first to New York, where she was to pass through a reformatory process with regard to dress. Then they were going to Saratoga, where she expected her niece to reign supreme, both as a beauty and a belle.