A careful, critical look at the prospect from the eastern window confirmed this opinion, and he repeated it with a gloomy face, adding,—
"I don't know when the weather has succeeded in disappointing me so much before."
"Never mind," Louise said cheerily. "It will not make much difference. I don't mind the rain. I have a rainy day suit, that mamma used to call my coat of mail. It is impervious to all sorts of weather; and, with your rubber coat, and a good-sized umbrella, we shall do almost as well as though the sun shone."
But her husband's face did not brighten.
"It is not personal inconvenience that I fear for you," he said gravely, "but disappointment. The truth is, Louise, I am afraid we can't go to church. This looks like a persistent storm, and my father has such a love for his horses, and such a dread of their exposure to these winter storms, that he never thinks of getting them out in the rain unless it is absolutely necessary; and you know he doesn't consider church-going an absolutely necessary thing. Could you bear to be disappointed, and stay at home with me all day?"
"Why, yes," said Louise slowly, trying to smile over those two words, "with me." "That is, if it is right. But, Lewis, it seems so strange a thing to do, to stay at home from church all day on account of a little rain that would hardly keep us from a shopping excursion."
"I know, looking at it from your standpoint it must seem very strange; but all the education of my home has been so different that I do not suppose it even seems as strange to me as to you. Still I by no means approve; and, as soon as I can make arrangements for a horse of my own, we will not be tried in this way. Indeed, Louise, I can manage it now. Of course, if I insist on it, my father will yield the point, but he will offer very serious objection. What do you think? Would it be right to press the question against his will?"
"Certainly not," his wife said hastily. "At least," she added, with a bright smile, "I don't suppose the command to obey one's parents is exactly annulled by the marriage service. Anyhow, the 'honour thy father and thy mother' never is."
And she put aside her church toilet, and made her preparations to do that which was to her an unprecedented thing—stay at home from church in full health and strength.
The question once settled that, under the circumstances, it was the proper thing to do, it was by no means a disagreeable way of spending Sabbath morning. Her husband had been so constantly occupied since their home-coming in carrying out his father's plans for improvements on the farm, that Louise had seen but little of him; and when, after breakfast, they returned to their own room, and he, in dressing-gown and slippers, replenished the crackling wood fire, and opened the entire front of the old-fashioned stove, letting the glow from it brighten the room, Louise admitted that the prospect was most inviting.