'It is most unfeminine, I am afraid,' she said, but I couldn't be tired if I tried.'
'You make me feel myself more than ever a shocking-example,' he said, letting it go with a little sigh. The smart of his own renunciation was still keen in him. She lingered a moment, could find nothing to say, threw him a look all shy sympathy and lovely pity, and was gone.
In the evening Robert got an explanation of that sudden stiffening in his auditor of the afternoon, which had perplexed him. He and the vicar were sitting smoking in the study after dinner, and the ingenious young man managed to shift the conversation on to the Leyburns, as he had managed to shift it once or twice before that day, flattering himself, of course, on each occasion that his manuvres were beyond detection. The vicar, good soul, by virtue of his original discovery, detected them all, and with a sense of appropriation in the matter, not at all unmixed with a sense of triumph over Mrs. T., kept the ball rolling merrily.
'Miss Leyburn seems to have very strong religious views,' said Robert, _à propos_ of some remark of the vicar's as to the assistance she was to him in the school.
'Ah, she is her father's daughter,' said the vicar, genially. He had his oldest coat on, his favorite pipe between his lips, and a bit of domestic carpentering on his knee at which he was fiddling away; and, being perfectly happy, was also perfectly amiable. 'Richard Leyburn was a fanatic--as mild as you please, but immovable.'
'Evangelical, with a dash of Quakerism. He lent me Madame Guyon's Life once to read. I didn't appreciate it. I told him that for all her religion she seemed to me to have a deal of the vixen in her. He could hardly get over it; it nearly broke our friendship. But I suppose he was very like her, except that--in my opinion--his nature was sweeter. He was a fatalist--saw leadings of Providence in every little thing. And such a dreamer! When he came to live up here just before his death, and all, his active life was taken off him, I believe half his time he was seeing visions. He used to wander over the fells and meet you with a start, as though you belonged to another world than the one, he was walking in.'