Christian fiction; Medical fiction; Scotland -- Fiction; Surgeons -- Fiction; Wingfold, Thomas (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
Juliet had soon almost as much teaching as she could manage. People
liked her, and children came to love her a little. A good report of her
spread. The work was hard, chiefly because it included more walking than
she had been accustomed to; but Dorothy generally walked with her, and
to the places furthest off, Helen frequently took her with her ponies,
and she got through the day's work pretty well. The fees were small, but
they sufficed, and made life a little easier to her host and his family.
Amanda got very fond of her, and, without pretending to teach her,
Juliet taught her a good deal. On Sundays she went to church; and
Dorothy, although it cost her a struggle to face the imputation of
resentment, by which the chapel-people would necessarily interpret the
change, went regularly with her, in the growing hope of receiving light
from the curate. Her father also not unfrequently accompanied her.
CHAPTER XXII.
TWO MINDS.
All this time poor Faber, to his offer of himself to Juliet, had
received no answer but a swoon--or something very near it. Every attempt
he made to see her alone at the rectory had been foiled; and he almost
came to the conclusion that the curate and his wife had set themselves
to prejudice against himself a mind already prejudiced against his
principles. It added to his uneasiness that, as he soon discovered, she
went regularly to church. He knew the power and persuasion of Wingfold,
and looked upon his influence as antagonistic to his hopes. Pride,
anger, and fear were all at work in him; but he went on calling, and did
his best to preserve an untroubled demeanor. Juliet imagined no change
in his feelings, and her behavior to him was not such as to prevent them
from deepening still.
Every time he went it was with a desperate resolution of laying his
hand on the veil in which she had wrapped herself, but every time he
found it impossible, for one reason or another, to make a single
movement toward withdrawing it. Again and again he tried to write to
her, but the haunting suspicion that she would lay his epistle before
her new friends, always made him throw down his pen in a smothering
indignation. He found himself compelled to wait what opportunity chance
or change might afford him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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