ortune, without condition or proviso.

This was of a Friday, and on the Saturday following David did his first
startling act--he offered marriage to Hope Marlowe, the only Quaker girl
in Framley who had ever dared to discard the poke bonnet even for a day,
and who had been publicly reproved for laughing in meeting--for Mistress
Hope had a curious, albeit demure and suggestive, sense of humour;
she was, in truth, a kind of sacred minuet in grey. Hope had promptly
accepted David, at the same time taunting him softly with the fact that
he had recklessly declared he would never marry, even saying profanely
that upon his word and honour he never would! She repeated to him what
his own mother once replied to his audacious worldly protests:

"If thee say thee will never, never, never do a thing, thee will some
day surely do it."

Then, seeing that David was a bit chagrined, Hope slipped one hand
into his, drew him back within the door, lifted the shovel hat off his
forehead, and whispered with a coquetry unworthy a Quaker maid:

"But thee did not say, friend David, thee would never, never, never
smite thy friend on both cheeks after she had flouted thee."

Having smitten her on both cheeks, after the manner of foolish men,
David gravely got him to his home and to a sound sleep that night.
Next morning, the remembrance of the pleasant smiting roused him to an
outwardly sedate and inwardly vainglorious courage. Going with steady
steps to the Friends' meeting-house at the appointed time, the Spirit
moved him, after a decorous pause, to announce his intended marriage
to the prettiest Quaker in Framley, even the maid who had shocked the
community's sense of decorum and had been written down a rebel--though
these things he did not say.

From the recesses of her poke bonnet Hope watched the effect of David's
words upon the meeting; but when the elders turned and looked at her,
as became her judges before the Lord, her eyes dropped; also her heart
thumped so hard she could hear it; and in the silence that followed it
seemed to beat time to the words like the pendulum of a clock: "Fear
not-Love on! Fear not--Love on!" But the heart beat faster still, the
eyes came up quickly, and the face flushed a deep, excited red when
David, rising again, said that, with the consent of the community--a
consent which his voice subtly insisted upon--he would take a long
journey into the Holy Land, into Syria, travelling to Baalbec and
Damascus,