Mrs. Waring threw up her head and looked at the rector’s wife, then her face flooded with pink, and there came a pain into her heart that she had never felt before. For the first time in her seven-and-thirty years this little woman was jealous.
“Gwen gave it!” she repeated. “Henry, do you think Gwen would give us one?”
There was a perceptible choke in her voice, and she put up her little hand to her throat with a swift movement.
“My love!” he said in a rather frightened way, “we could hardly ask our daughter for such a very valuable present.”
“I suppose we could not,” she said, with sweet humility.
“My reasonable, my docile one!” he thought, with tender satisfaction, “better a thousand times than any other female type, serving or otherwise.”
He might have felt more disturbed if he had had the merest ghost of a notion as to the causes of her humility, which had less to do with him than he would altogether have relished. With all this congestion of novel emotion the woman was losing her pristine transparency.
“What are your plans for the afternoon?” asked the rector. “You know that even the ordinary decencies of civilization have to be shunted in a parson’s life, I must be off in five minutes. Are you on for a walk, Waring?”
“I!—Oh, thank you, but, we—I—we—” he caught nervously on to his wife’s eyes, “we—we are very much engaged just now. We just called concerning this matter of quinine, and we have already absorbed too much of your time; untimely visitors are a keen trial—my wife and I have suffered much from this form of affliction.”
The rector laughed.