“It has been a tug for me, something to go through with. You do not know unless you have had something of the sort happen to you. It may end in my going away. She is everything to be desired, and more than I deserve. A splendid looking girl, a college graduate, just the wife for a minister, keen as a flash, quick at repartee, as spicy as a magazine article, born to command, a perfect lady, with a winning manner, and I can’t love her if it kills me. I’ve been down on my knees begging the Lord to make me love her: and she is no more to me than a picture, or a statue, or a character in a book. It unmans me to feel how her heart has gone out to me. She is as brave about it as she can be.”
“How, in the name of wonder, do you know it then?” asked Roger, in astonishment.
“I know it because I cannot help knowing it. If you do not know how I know it I cannot tell you. Her mother knows it, and how she watches me. They say Frederick Robertson married in a like way; he was afraid he had been dishonorable. But this is none of my doing.”
“All my steering will not keep me clear of her. We are constantly brought together.”
Richard King would not laugh; the very telling his trouble appeared treason in his eyes.
“I know what is the matter,” ejaculated Roger, suddenly. “You have seen some other woman, or you would succumb.”
“I have seen several other women,” he said, thinking only of one,—the girl with a blind mother in Bensalem.
“Don’t let it drive you away from your work.”
“I think she may go away. I think her mother will send her away. I think I would rather face the cannon’s mouth than be left alone half an hour with that old lady.”
“Not if she has the common sense I think she has. I am the last man for a girl to fall in love with,” he added, ruefully.
“Don’t count too much on that,” advised Roger, gravely.
At six o’clock Daisy was driven around to the stable to be fed; Judith was taking her molasses cake from the oven and heeded neither voices nor footsteps.
“I told you so,” cried Roger, delighted, coming to the kitchen doorway. “See here, King, and look here, and _smell_ here.”
“Well, I think so,” exclaimed the bachelor housekeeper in dismay and delight.
“Table set, too,” declared Roger, stepping into the tiny dining-room. “No table-cloth; how is that, Judith?”