"You are very kind," said the vicar, scarcely aware of what he was saying.
"Indeed, I wish to be so," she replied, smiling. "Of course you know Mr. Haldane?"
"No; I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting him. He--you had gone abroad before I came to Omberley."
"And do you like the place--and the people?"
"You are not married yet, I think Mr. Haldane said?"
The vicar looked at her with a sadness that was almost reproachful as he answered, "No; I have my sister living with me."
"How pleasant! You _must_ bring Miss Santley with you when you come, will you not?"
As she spoke she moved slowly towards the gateway opening on to the road, where a little basket-carriage was awaiting her. He accompanied her, and for a few seconds there was silence between them. Then they shook hands again before she got into the carriage, and she repeated her assurance--
"I am so glad to have met you, Mr. Santley!"
She took the reins, and, lightly flicking the ponies with the whip, flashed upon him a farewell smile from those dark, spiritual eyes and laughing lips.
The vicar turned back into the churchyard, and following a narrow path that led across the sward through a wicket and a small beech plantation, entered the Vicarage with a pale, troubled face.
|When he reached the house he found that his presence was needed at the bedside of a labourer, who had met with a serious accident a day or two before, and who was now sinking rapidly. Mr. Santley was a man who never begrudged time or trouble in the interests of his parishioners; and, though he had yet another service to attend, and was already fatigued by the work of the day, he readily signified his willingness to comply with the request of the dying man, and at once started for the village.
He felt at the moment that the duty placed before him would be a relief from the thronging recollections and the wild promptings which had set his heart and brain in a turmoil. As he went down the road, however, the face of the dying man who had sent to seek his priestly aid, and the face of the beautiful wife of the owner of Foxglove Manor, seemed to be striving for mastery over him; he was unable to concentrate his attention on any subject. His will was in abeyance, and he appeared to himself to be in a sort of waking nightmare, in which the most distorted thoughts of marriage and death, of a lost love and of a lost God, of the mockery of life, the mockery of youth, the mockery of religion, presented themselves before him in a hideous masquerade, till the function he was about to fulfil appeared to him at one moment a sacrilege and at another a degrading folly.