"It's second nature with me and I can't help it any more than you can help getting up with the sun and poring over those tedious papers; Stephen, I would think you ought to get sick of such work."
"So I do, Hester, but I must not let myself feel so; there may be an end far too soon."
"Stephen you are getting a monomaniac on these things. I tell you what it is if William Montgomery were in your shoes he would not last a week. Thank God, he is a farmer—there's no life like it."
"True, indeed, Hester; I wish I had become a sturdy yeoman before I gave myself up to this business. Ah! it's nothing but uncertainty."
"Listen to me Stephen; the quiet of the hour prompts me to say something which I have been thinking of for some time past—it is of Mr. Lawson."
"Yes," said Mr. Verne, in a manner that seemed to say that he knew what was coming, "he is a worthy young man!"
"Worthy, did you say, Stephen? There is no words in the English language sufficient to speak his praise. He is a man such as the Creator premeditated before the world rose out of chaos—a man in the true image of his Maker!"
Could Phillip Lawson then have looked upon this woman as she sat there and spoke such holy thoughts—how simple and yet how eloquent—could he then have heard the tenderhearted matron plead for him what a flood of gratitude would have welled out from his honest heart!
"I have invited Phillip Lawson to 'Gladswood' purposely to study him through and through, and each time I find something nobler in him to admire."
"I believe it," said Mr. Verne, gravely.