Page:The Small House at Allington Vol 1.djvu/133

Rh herself to suppose that he could propose anything that was unkind. But she felt her loss, and more than once, as she knelt at her prayers, she wiped a hidden tear from her eyes.

Crosbie also was thinking of his departure more than he should have done during Mr. Boyce's sermon. "It's easy listening to him," Mrs. Hearn used to say of her husband's successor. "It don't give one much trouble following him into his arguments." Mr. Crosbie perhaps found the difficulty greater than did Mrs. Hearn, and would have devoted his mind more perfectly to the discourse had the argument been deeper. It is very hard, that necessity of listening to a man who says nothing. On this occasion Crosbie ignored the necessity altogether, and gave up his mind to the consideration of what it might be expedient that he should say to Lily before he went. He remembered well those few words which he had spoken in the first ardour of his love, pleading that an early day might be fixed for their marriage. And he remembered, also, how prettily Lily had yielded to him. "Only do not let it be too soon," she had said. Now he must unsay what he had then said. He must plead against his own pleadings, and explain to her that he desired to postpone the marriage rather than to hasten it—a task which, I presume, must always be an unpleasant one for any man engaged to be married. "I might as well do it at once," he said to himself, as he bobbed his head forward into his hands by way of returning thanks for the termination of Mr. Boyce's sermon.

As he had only three days left, it was certainly as well that he should do this at once. Seeing that Lily had no fortune, she could not in justice complain of a prolonged engagement. That was the argument which he used in his own mind. But he as often told himself that she would have very great ground of complaint if she were left for a day unnecessarily in doubt as to this matter. Why had he rashly spoken those hasty words to her in his love, betraying himself into all manner of scrapes, as a schoolboy might do, or such a one as Johnny Eames? What an ass he had been not to have remembered himself and to have been collected,—not to have bethought himself on the occasion of all that might be due to Adolphus Crosbie! And then the idea came upon him whether he had not altogether made himself an ass in this matter. And as he gave his arm to Lily outside the church-door, he shrugged his shoulders while making that reflection. "It is too late now," he said to himself; and then turned round and made some sweet little