“It doesn’t matter. I will open the book, and no one will be the wiser.”
“But you will be thinking during the hymn of Eggin’s pigs and Gammon’s sheriffalty.”
“I’ll do better next Sunday. The gardener tells me they have turned up your single dahlias.”
“Hush! we are in the church. Arminell is not in the pew. Where can she be?”
Arminell was not in church. She was, in fact, walking away from it, and by the time her father had entered his pew and looked into his hat, had put a distance of half a mile between herself and the sacred building. A sudden fit of disgust at the routine of Sunday duties had come over her, and she resolved to absent herself that morning from church, and pay a visit to a deserted lime quarry, where she could spend an hour alone, and her moral and religious sense, as she put it, could recover tone after the ordeal of Sunday-school.
“What can induce my lady to take a class every Sunday?” questioned Arminell in her thought. “It does no good to the children, and it maddens the teachers. But, oh! what a woman mamma is! Providence must have been hard up for ideas when it produced my lady. How tiresome!”
These last words were addressed to a bramble that had caught in her skirt. She shook her gown impatiently and walked on. The bramble still adhered and dragged.
“What a nuisance,” said Arminell, and she whisked her skirt round and endeavoured to pick off the brier, but ineffectually.
“Let me assist you,” said a voice; and in a moment a young man leaped the park wall, stepped on the end of the bramble, and said, “Now, if you please, walk on, Miss Inglett.”
Arminell took a few steps and was free. She turned, and with a slight bow said, “I thank you, Mr. Saltren.” Then, with a smile, “I wish I could get rid of all tribulations as easily.”