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 who had so seldom honored them with her presence, and who always tried so hard to impress them with a sense of her superiority and the mighty favor she conferred upon them by occasionally condescending to bring her aristocratic presence into their quiet, plain household, and turn it topsy-turvy. Still, she was Anna's aunt, and then, too, it was a distinction which Aunt Ruth rather enjoyed, that of having a fashionable city woman for her guest, and so she submitted with a good grace to the breaking in upon all her customs, and uttered no word of complaint when the breakfast table waited till eight, and sometimes nine o'clock, and the freshest eggs were taken from the nest, and the cream all skimmed from the pans to gratify the lady who came down very charming and pretty in her handsome cambric wrapper, with rosebuds in her hair. She had arrived the previous night, and while the rector was penning his letter she was holding Anna's hand in hers, and, running her eye rapidly over her face and form, was making an inventory of her charms and calculating their value.