“I know you don’t want to talk about it now,” he went on hastily. “But you’ll come home with mother to-morrow, won’t you? You know she wants you, and I––I never had to tell you that I love you. You knew it when you wasn’t any higher than Prince here.”
“Yes. I always knew it, and I’m glad,” the girl answered levelly. “I’m glad now, Jeff. But I can’t let you do it. Some day you’d hate me for it.”
“Ruth! You know better than that!”
“Oh, you’d never tell me; I know that. You’d do your best to hide it from me. But some day when your chance was gone you’d look back and see what you might have been, ’stead of a humpbacked farmer in the hills. Oh, I know. You’ve told me all your dreams and plans, how you’re going down to the law school, and going to be a great lawyer and go to Albany and maybe to Washington.”
“What’s it all good for?” said the boy sturdily. “I’d rather stay here with you.”
The girl did not answer. In the strain of the night and the day, she had almost forgotten the things that she had heard her father say to the White Horse Chaplain, as she continued to call the Bishop.
Now she remembered those things and tried to tell them.
“That strange man that said he was the Bishop of Alden told my father that he would see that I got a chance. My father called him the White Horse Chaplain and said that he had been sent here just on purpose to look after me. I didn’t know there were bishops in this country. I thought it was only in books about Europe.”
“What did they say?”