"No; not a day, not an hour before," returned the girl resolutely. "My dear old friend, this is not a whim only, it is real stern necessity. The dearest friends I possess have been in great trouble, as you know, and my seeming poverty has enabled me to help them; it is for their sake, not mine, that I am making this further delay. There, it is decided; and now let us talk of something else," she finished gaily.
But Caleb was only half-mollified.
"She is thinner, and looks different somehow," he said to his faithful confidante, Molly, that night. "There is a peaking look in her brown eyes, like a half-fledged bird that sees its nest, but can't find its way to it. I doubt that she is not quite happy, Molly."
"Nay; she is no differ from other young girls," returned Molly shrewdly. "Bless your dear heart, Mr. Runciman, they are all alike! they fret a bit, and then cheer up. It is the law of nature, that's where it is; she will be as perky and chirping-like as ever by-and-bye," and Molly, who knew the symptoms well, and had buried her own sweetheart many years ago, changed the subject with womanly tact and sympathy.
CHAPTER IX.
"TOO MANY COOKS."
"Make the doors upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and 'twill out of the keyhole; stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out of the chimney."—Shakespeare.
It was a mild day in February, and as Queenie closed the door of the little school-house, and walked up the field that led to the vicarage, it seemed to her as though the very air held a promise of spring. Now Queenie, like all healthy young creatures, dearly loved the spring-time; to her imaginative temperament there could be nothing more beautiful and satisfying than to watch this spectacle of a faded and dead nature rising again into fresh life.
"How can people say there is no hereafter, when the miracle of the resurrection is every year repeated before our eyes?" she said to herself. To her there was ever a fresh pleasure in seeing the brown, lifeless limbs of the elms and sycamores gradually clothe themselves, first with budding shoots, and then with fair, green leaves. The bursting hedgerows, the unfolding of the fronds of ferns, the first peep of the fairy white bells of snowdrops, the pale glitter of primroses, and the fragrance of violets, gave her a positive feeling of happiness.
Everything so new, so fresh, so fair, soiled by no dust, scorched by no burning sunshine; the whole world bright and unsullied as a baby soul, to whom good and evil are unknown mysteries, and life means nothing but perpetual satisfaction and content.