Business claimed its place after dinner, business of a less pleasant kind, quite up to the time when Faith must put on her bonnet to walk with Dr. Harrison.
Faith had no great mind to the walk, but she couldn't help finding it pleasant. The open air was very sweet and bracing; the exercise was inspiriting, and the threatened talk went well with both. There was nothing whatever formidable about it; the words and thoughts seemed to play, like the sunlight, on anything that came in their way. Dr. Harrison knew how to make a walk or a talk pleasant, even to Faith, it seemed. Whatever she had at any time seen in him that she did not like, was out of sight; pleasant, gentle, intelligent, grave, he was constantly supplying ear and mind with words and things that were worth the having. Probably he had discovered her eager thirst for knowledge; for he furnished her daintily with bits of many a kind, from his own stores which were large. She did not know there was any design in this; she knew only that the steps were taken very easily in that walk. So pleasant it was that Faith was in no haste to turn, in no mood to quicken her pace. But something else was on her mind,—and must come out.
"Dr. Harrison,"—she said when they were in a quiet part of the way, with nobody near, "may I speak to you about something?—that perhaps you won't like?"
"You can speak of nothing I should not like—to hear," he said with gentle assurance.
"Dr. Harrison—" said Faith, speaking as if the recollection touched her,—"when you and I were thrown out in that meadow the other day and came so near losing our lives—if the almost had been quite, if we had both been killed,—I should have been safe and well, I believe.—How would it have been with you?"
Dr. Harrison looked at her.
"If I had gone in your company," he said, "I think it would hardly have been ill with me."
"Do you know so little as that?"—she said, in such a tone of sorrow and pity as might have suited one of the 'ministering spirits' she had been likened to.
"I don't think I am as good as you are," the doctor said with a face not unmoved.
"Good!" said Faith. "What do you mean by goodness, Dr. Harrison?"