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