The Rector of St. Marks | Page 3

letter, so like its thoughtless, lighthearted writer, and wondered
what the Widow Rider, across the way, would say of a clergyman who
smoked cigars and rode after a race-horse with such a gay scapegrace
as Thornton Hastings. Then the amused look passed away, and was
succeeded by a shadow of pain as the rector remembered the real
import of Thornton's letter, and felt that he had no right to say, "I have
a claim on Anna Ruthven; you must not interfere." For he had no claim
on her, though half his parishioners, and many outside his parish, had
long ago given her to him, and said that she was worthy; while he had
loved her, as only natures like his can love, since that week before
Christmas, when their hands had met with a strange, tremulous flutter,
as together they fastened the wreaths of evergreen upon the wall, he
holding them up and she driving the refractory tacks, which would keep
falling in spite of her, so that his hand went often from the carpet or
basin to hers, and once accidentally closed almost entirely over the
little, soft, white thing, which felt so warm to his touch.
How prettily Anna had looked to him during those memorable days, so
much prettier than the other young girls of his flock, whose hair was
tumbled ere the day's work was done, and whose dresses were soiled
and disordered; while here was always so tidy and neat and the braids
of her chestnut hair were always so smooth and bright. How well, too,
he remembered that brief ten minutes, when, in the dusky twilight
which had crept so early into the church, he stood alone with her, and
talked, he did not know of what, only that he heard her voice replying
to him, and saw the changeful color on her cheek as she looked
modestly in his face. 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. Still, she was Anna's aunt, and then, too, it was a
distinction which Aunt Ruth rather enjoyed, that of having a
fashionable city woman for her guest, and so she submitted with a good
grace to the breaking in upon all her customs, and uttered no word of
complaint when the breakfast table waited till eight, and sometimes
nine o'clock, and the freshest eggs were taken from the nest, and the
cream all skimmed from the pans to gratify the lady who came down
very charming and pretty in her handsome cambric wrapper, with
rosebuds in her hair. She had arrived the previous night, and while the
rector was penning his letter she was holding Anna's hand in hers, and,
running her eye rapidly over her face and form, was making an
inventory of her charms and calculating their value.
A very graceful figure, neither too short nor too tall. This she gets from
the Ruthvens. Splendid eyes and magnificent hair, when Valencia has
once taken it in hand. Complexion a little too brilliant, but a few weeks
of dissipation will cure that. Fine teeth, and features tolerably regular,

except that the mouth is too wide, and the forehead too low, which
defects she takes from the Humphreys. Small feet and rather pretty
hands,