'For the present. I approve of finishing things when they are begun.'
'Mr. Dallas, what are you going to do? In what, after all, are you going to be unlike other men? Your mother seems to apprehend some disastrous and mysterious change in all your prospects; I cannot see the necessity of that. In what are you going to be other than she wishes you to be? Are not her fears mistaken?'
Pitt smiled a grave smile; again stopped in his work and stood opposite her.
'I might say "yes" and "no,"' he answered. 'I do not expect to have a red cross embroidered on my sleeve, like the old crusaders. But judge yourself. Can those who live to do the will of God be just like those whose one concern is to do their own will?'
'Mr. Dallas, you insinuate, or your words might be taken to insinuate, that all the rest of us are in the latter class!'
'Whose will do you do?' he said.
There was no answer, for Betty had too much pluck to speak falsely, and too much sense not to know what was truth. She accordingly did not say anything, and after waiting a minute or two Pitt went on with his preparations, locking up drawers, packing up boxes, taking down and putting away the many objects that filled the room. There was not a little work of this sort to be done, and he went on with it busily, and with an evidently trained and skilled hand.
'Then, after finishing with law, do you expect to come back here and unpack all these pretty things again?' she said finally.
'Perhaps. I do not know.'
'Perhaps you will settle in England?'