"No, indeed! What are you thinking about?" returned Faith, quite terrified at the idea.
She sat at the tea-table a little sad and confused as Miss Hope plied her with good-natured jokes and questions. Why did not Cara want her to talk? why was Prudence so snapping and hard? and why could they not all leave her alone with her thoughts?
"I think I will read now," she said, taking up the book and sinking with a sigh into her usual seat.
As the soft harmonious voice made itself heard Miss Charity's eyes filled with tears and her forehead contracted as though with pain. "And she must lose this her one consolation," she thought. Faith's reading was to her as David's harp to the sick soul of Saul—it drove away the evil spirit of despondency. "It is giving the widow's mite—all I have," thought Miss Charity, with a little thrill of pathos.
As for Faith, she went through her allotted task with an outward semblance of patience and much inward rebellion, reading mechanically, without perceiving the drift of the sense. "And he meant this all the time," she said to herself. "Oh, how little I deserve him and my happiness."
Faith's evening, on the whole, had been disappointing, but before many hours were over she found that things were not to be arranged to her liking. The moment it came to a clashing of wills she soon discovered that Dr. Stewart's was to be paramount.
Faith had certain old-fashioned views on the subject of courtship and matrimony. The one must not be too brief or the other too sudden in her opinion. Dr. Stewart's views were in direct opposition.
"When a man gets on to middle age, and has knocked about the world as much as I have done," he said to her the following afternoon as they again plodded through the miry roads, only now a pale uncertain sunshine followed them, "he finds courtship just a trifle difficult. I am a plain man, and speak my mind plainly, Faith. We've known each other, or at least thought about each other, these ten years. We are neither of us young, and we are not likely to get younger; so if you're ready I'm more than willing, and we will just say the middle of November, and talk no more about it."
"But, Angus, that is only just six weeks!" faltered his fiancée.
"Yes, and that's a fortnight too much," he returned bluntly. "Shall we make it the end of October then?" at which alarming alternative Faith had only just strength to gasp out a faint negative, and subside into startled silence. After all, was not this exchanging one sort of tyranny for another?