Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/306

just the minutest way from him, turned half round on her heel and spoke:

"What," she said, "become a priest's wife; out here in Norway—live in the praestegaard, or not that even; surely you are only a deacon so far?—in the little house behind the schoolroom? And in time—perhaps in time—to improve into someone like Frue Margetson, with her sad, wrinkled face and eager, anxious eyes, Do you ask me to do this, Herr Hjorth?"

"I ask you to be my wife," he repeated, ignoring the chance she gave him of tacking away from the serious side of the subject. He spoke sullenly. The prescience of disappointment was upon him. Amy Travis turned half towards him and then back before she spoke.

"Surely you must have known; surely this must have told you that I am already engaged," she asked, holding forth her left hand and touching a single ring that adorned the third finger of it.

The deacon shuddered. Here indeed was a blow.

"No, no, I did not," he stammered, "the ring told me nothing. We wear it on the right hand here in Norway."

"I am sorry," said the girl; and then she turned from him in real earnest and left him standing there beside the flag-staff, where he continued to stand until the inn-porter came and hauled the flag down, and the deacon strode off to the house.

This episode annoyed him terribly. His pride was so abased that he assured himself he had been outrageously badly treated.

It seemed to him so monstrous that a man who was going to be a priest should be made the subject of a frivolous girl's flirtation. He was now as enraged with Amy Travis and her attentions as before he had been flattered by them. It was pretty generally the feeling in the hotel also that he had been badly treated. Theylooked