"Starke and his wife?" she asked, arranging her scarf. "I never desire to be with him, or with any man recreant to his work."
"Recreant, eh? Starke? Well, no; he works hard, digs and ditches, and is happy. I think he takes his work more humbly and healthily than any man I know."
Miss Defourchet looked absently out at the gleaming river. Her interest had always been languid in the man since he had declined either to fight fate or drown himself. The Doctor jerked his hat down into the bottom of the carriage and pulled open his cravat.
"Hah! do you catch that river-breeze? Don't that expand your lungs? And the whiff of the fresh clover-blossoms? I come out here to study my sermons, did you know? Nature is so simple and grand here, a man could not well say a mean or unbrotherly thing while he stays. It forces you to be 'a faithful witness' to the eternal truth. There is good fishing hereabouts, eh, Jim?"—calling to the driver. "Do you see that black pool under the sycamore?"
"I could not call it 'faithful witnessing' to delight in taking even a fish's life," dryly said his niece.
The Doctor winced.
"It's the old Adam in me, I suppose. You'll have to be charitable to the different making-up of people, Mary."
However, he was silent for a while after that, with rather an extinguished feeling, bursting out again when they reached the gate of a little snug place by the road-side.
"Here is where my little friend Ann lives. There's a wife for you! 'And though she rules him, never shows she rules.' They've a dairy-farm, you know, back of the hills; but they live here because it was her father's toll-house then, and they won't give up the old place. I like such notions. Andy's full of them. There he is! Hillo, Fawcett!"
Andy came out from the kitchen-garden, his freckled face redder than his hair, his eyes showing his welcome. Dr. Bowdler was an old tried friend now of his and Ann's. "He took a heap of nonsense out of me," he used to say.