“It is. I feel strange!” he replied. “I want you to tell me where this road goes to, if you please. I am so strange, I do not even know that.”
“Kingsford Carbonel,” she answered briefly.
“Ah! The archdeacon lives there, does he not?”
“Yes.”
“And the distance, please, is——?”
“Three miles.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Really you are as concise as a mile-stone, Miss Bonamy. And now let me remind you,” he continued—there was an air of “I am going on this moment” about her, which provoked him to detain her the longer—“that you have not yet asked me what I think of Claversham.”
“I would rather ask you in a month’s time,” Kate answered quietly, holding out her hand to take leave. “Though it is already reported in the town that you will only stay a year, Mr. Lindo.”
“I shall only stay a year!” the rector repeated in astonishment.
“Certainly,” she answered, smiling, and relapsing for a moment into the pleasant frankness of that day at Oxford—“only a year; your days are already numbered.”