There was a half-amused smile on the face of the rector as he finished the letter, so like its thoughtless, light-hearted writer, and wondered what the Widow Rider, across the way, would say of a clergyman who smoked cigars, and rode after a race-horse with such a gay scapegrace as Thornton Hastings. Then the amused look passed away, and was succeeded by a shadow of pain, as the rector remembered the real import of Thornton’s letter, and felt that he had no right to say, “I have a claim on Anna Ruthven; you must not interfere.” For he had no claim on her, though half his parishioners had long ago given her to him, 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, 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 hers 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 into 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 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 warm nor tiresome, and the old lady by whose bedside he read and prayed was surprised to hear him as he left her door, whistling an old love-tune which she, too, had known and sang fifty years before. CHAPTER II. SATURDAY AFTERNOON.