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"But you know that a great many things are allowed now that were once forbidden to the True Disbeliever." "You mean that we may trust in the promises, as they used to be called, and still keep the Unfaith?" "Something like that." Alderling took his pipe out, apparently to give his whole face to the pleasure of teasing his wife.
Alderling had been so nearly lost in it, and presently the masts and shrouds of the shipping at anchor were sticking up out of it as if they were sunk into a body as dense as the sea under them. I amused myself watching it blot out one detail of the prospect after another, while the fog-horn lowed through it, and the bell-buoy, far out beyond the light-house ledge, tolled mournfully.
There was a third plate laid, and I expected that when the housekeeper had put the dishes on the table, she would sit down with us, as the country-fashion still is, but she did not reappear till she came in with the dessert and coffee. Alderling ate hungrily, and much more than I had remembered his doing, but perhaps I formerly had the impression of Mrs.
Alderling died, but I heard that it was from a typhoid fever which she had contracted from the water in their well, as was supposed. The water-supply all along that coast is scanty, and that summer most of the wells were dry, and quite a plague of typhoid raged among the people from drinking the dregs.
"You know," she said to him, and I never could decide how much she was in earnest, "that I can't believe till you do. I couldn't take the risk of keeping on without you." Alderling followed her in-doors, where she now went to put the book away, with the mock addressed to me, "Did you ever know such a stubborn woman?"
They never did; they amused me; and when I saw that she had something of the sort on her mind, I would say, 'Well, out with it, Marion! She would always begin, 'Well, you may laugh!" and as he repeated her words Alderling did laugh, forlornly, and as I must say, rather bloodcurdlingly. I could not prompt him to go on, but he presently did so himself, desolately enough.
"Shall I go to my old room?" "Go anywhere," he answered, and he let me carry my bag to the chamber where I had slept before. It was quite as his wife would have arranged it, even to the detail of a triangular portion of the bedding turned down as she used to do it for me. The place was well aired and dusted, and gave me the sense of being as immaculately clean and fresh as Alderling was not.
I noticed that beyond the habit of cooks she partook of the dishes she had prepared, and that after Alderling and I had finished dinner, and he was impatient to get at his pipe, she remained prolonging her dessert.
You remember how literally she brought those Scripture texts to bear on it?" "Yes. May I say that it was very affecting?" "Affecting!" Alderling repeated in a tone of amaze at the inadequacy of my epithet. "She was always finding things that bore upon the point. After awhile she got to concealing them, as if she thought they annoyed me.
Alderling did not talk less, nor he more, when either was alone with me, than when we were all together; perhaps he was more silent, and she not quite so much; she was making up for him in his absence as he was for her in her presence. But they were always hospitable and attentive hosts, and though under the peculiar circumstances of Mrs.
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