That was a week of delicious happiness, and the
rector had lived it over many times, wondering if, when the next
Christmas came, it would find him any nearer to Anna Ruthven than the
last had left him.
"It must," he suddenly exclaimed. "The matter shall be settled before
she leaves Hanover with this Mrs. Meredith. My claim is superior to
Thornton's, and he shall not take her from me. I'll write what I lack
the courage to tell her, and to-morrow I will call and deliver it
myself."
An hour later, and there was lying in the rector's desk a letter in
which he had told Anna Ruthven how much he loved her, and had asked
her to be his wife. Something whispered that she would not refuse him,
and with this hope to buoy him up, his two miles walk that warm
afternoon was neither long nor tiresome, and the old lady, by whose
bedside he had read and prayed, was surprised to hear him as he left
her door whistling an old love-tune which she, too, had known and sung
fifty years before.
CHAPTER II.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON.
Mrs. Julia Meredith had arrived, and the brown farmhouse was in a
state of unusual excitement; not that Captain Humphreys or his good
wife, Aunt Ruth, respected very highly the great lady who had so
seldom honored them with her presence, and who always tried so hard to
impress them with a sense of her superiority and the mighty favor she
conferred upon them by occasionally condescending to bring her
aristocratic presence into their quiet, plain household, and turn it
topsy-turvy.
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