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As yet, her meaning was opaque to him. "Yes, do about it," Catia echoed, in her turn. "They say there's sure to be a vacancy, and that it's a splendid place." "Who say?" Brenton queried cautiously. "All the convocation. Don't be a dunce and pretend, Scott. Anyway, I'm not a mole; I can see which way the weather vanes are pointing. They were all talking about it, while the convocation was going on.
He might have known it; but, unhappily, he never had found it altogether worth his while to meditate very much upon the question. He passed by Catia as an established fact; he left her quite unanalyzed.
Then she spoke, and her accent conveyed the same impression as concerned the conversation. "Oh, no; Catia is just a little nickname. That is all. My name is really Kathryn." And then, for an instant and to her lasting shame, Olive Keltridge's glance sought that of Brenton. Before the hurt and abased look in his deep gray eyes, her own eyes dropped, ashamed and pitiful.
In this narrow valley the atmosphere is in some sort balanced between two winds, one blowing from the west, or the seaside, the other from the east, or the inland country. The first is known by the name of the wind of Catia, because it blows from Catia westward of Cabo Blanco through the ravine of Tipe.
"Scott," Catia let go the coffee pot and looked up to face him; "I do wish you'd begin to think about smartening yourself up a little." Brenton, who still clung to his bachelor habit of reading the newspaper between swallows of coffee and snatches of toast and jam, looked up at the arraignment which lay in Catia's tone, if not within her words. "Smarten myself up?" he echoed, in blank question.
However, Catia would grant him a little resting time, before she goaded him up to girding his loins anew. Indeed, he needed it, she admitted freely to herself in her more generous moments. The years of study, long at best, and, in his case, lengthened by needful intervals of money-earning toil, had taken it out of him badly.
To Catia it seemed that, the first of her milestones reached, it was time for her to sit down for a while, and rest, and take a little comfort out of thinking over what she already had achieved. To Scott, the first stage of his journey had scarcely been begun. Indeed, it did not even start from that night, nor from any night in which Catia's memory could have a share.
"The Bishop was all right," she said, with an emphasis so caustic as to catch and hold his attention. Used as he had become, the past two years, to pinpricks of this sort, his colour betrayed how much the present pinprick hurt him. None the less, he still held on to his temper. "And I wasn't?" he queried, with an effort at a smile. "Sorry, Catia. What's the trouble?"
And now, dear boy," her eyes drooped lower still over her request; "now that you haven't her to consider any longer, aren't you willing to do just one very, very little thing for me?" "I hope so, Catia," Brenton responded, still quite gravely. "What is it that you want?" Despite her efforts to the contrary, her voice thrilled with the sudden surety that she had gained her cause.
Catia had rebelled at the idea of walking to their train; but the one hack afforded by the village had gone away to a funeral in the next town but two. So they went stepping out into the new life before them: Catia Brenton and Scott, her husband.
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