"Because I want the size of your finger. I will bring you the prettiest ring I can find in Bond Street." "Your father will think it very sudden," I said lamely. "He will sing his _Nunc Dimittis_," he answered. "But we will keep him with us as long as we can all the same." CHAPTER XXVII. THE WEB OF THE SPIDER. I refused to wait to see the General, but rather made Lance take me home early. "I won't forbid your telling him," I said, "since you think it will make him so happy, but I don't want it talked about for a few days, till I have grown used to it, and you come back." So he consented, only saying how unlike we were, for he wanted everyone to know his new importance; and I did not know whether he jested or not. I made him say good-bye to me on the doorstep of Brandon, and watched him climb into the dog-cart again, grumbling at my tyranny and want of hospitality. I could not trust myself to sit opposite him in the presence of Aline and the others without betraying my secret, over which I felt so exquisitely shy. Dear Aline suspected nothing, but was quite satisfied with my explanation that Captain MacNeill had not come in because he wanted to be back in time to meet his father. And now began for me the strangest, goldenest, most exquisite time of dreams. It might have been May in the world instead of January, and the sun shining instead of the rain incessantly falling. That was a terribly wet season--the wettest, said the old people, that the longest memory could recall. There was distress in Brandon village, and all about the country. Rotting thatch was falling into the poor cabins and on to the reeking mud floors, so that in many cases the wretched fires of half-green twigs were extinguished and the bed whereon the sick or the old or the babies lay went travelling round the bare walls, seeking a sound spot where the rain would not find it. It was at such times of distress that we felt our poverty most keenly, though I think our good people knew as well as we did how great our will was to help them. Yet even the trouble of others could not damp my joy in those days, or at least it shadowed my life on only one side of it, and the other lay incessantly turned to the sun. But still I thought a good deal about Esther's trouble, which I seemed to understand better in the light of my own joy. Amid my thanksgivings for my own sweet happiness, I prayed hard for her that her trouble might be removed and her joy given back, if God saw well to do it.