"Black? I didn't know anything was black," said Madge. "Here is Mr. Dillwyn, come to take me sleigh-riding. Just think, Lois!—a sleigh ride in the Park!—O, I'm so glad I have got my hood done!"
Lois slowly turned her head round. "Sleigh-riding?" she said. "Are you going sleigh-riding, and with Mr. Dillwyn?"
"Yes indeed, why not?" said Madge, bustling about with great activity. "I'd rather go with him than with anybody else, I can tell you. He has got his sister's horses—Mrs. Burrage don't like sleighing—and Mr. Burrage begged he would take the horses out. They're gay, but he knows how to drive. O, won't it be magnificent?"
Lois looked at her sister in silence, unwilling, yet not knowing what to object; while Madge wrapped herself in a warm cloak, and donned a silk hood lined with cherry colour, in which she was certainly something to look at. No plainer attire nor brighter beauty would be seen among the gay snow-revellers that afternoon. She flung a sparkling glance at her sister as she turned to go.
"Don't be very long!" Lois said.
"Just as long as he likes to make it!" Madge returned. "Do you think I am going to ask him to turn about, before he is ready? Not I, I promise you. Good-bye, hermit!"
Away she ran, and Lois turned again to her window, where all the white seemed suddenly to have become black. She will marry him!—she was saying to herself. And why should she not? she has made no promise. I am bound—doubly; what is it to me, what they do? Yet if not right for me it is not right for Madge. Is the Bible absolute about it?
She thought it would perhaps serve to settle and stay her mind if she went to the Bible with the question and studied it fairly out. She drew up the table with the book, and prayed earnestly to be taught the truth, and to be kept contented with the right. Then she opened at the well-known words in 2 Corinthians, chap. vi.
"Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers"—
"Yoked together." That is, bound in a bond which obliges two to go one way and pull in one draught. Then of course they must go one way; and which way, will depend upon which is strongest. But cannot a good woman use her influence to induce a man who is also good, only not Christian, to go the right way?