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Updated: June 28, 2025
It was a long hard day's work, and before it was over the village was ringing with the news of all this change. The minister had already called on Ann and Christa, saying suitable things concerning their father's terrible crime and their own sad position. When he was gone Christa laughed.
It was when the sisters were again alone for the night that she first broke the silence of her fears. "Christa, father came to the window last night, but went away again before I could catch him." "Sure he would never show his face in this place, Ann. You must have been dreaming!" "Well, I must try to find him. I tell you what I'm going to do.
A moment's effort to regain her habitual standpoint made it quite clear to her that in this case it was she, she and Christa, who were making the sacrifice; a minute more, and she could almost have found it in her heart to grumble at the condition of the vow which she had so liberally sketched the night before, and only the fact that there was something about Bart which she did not at all understand, and a fear that that something might be a propensity to withdraw from his engagement, made her submissively adhere to it.
Now between Bart Toyner and Christa and herself she felt that a great gulf was fixed. Well, she did not know; she did not understand; she was not at all sure that she wanted to understand anything more about Bart Toyner and all the complex considerations about life which the thought of him seemed to arouse in her.
"I was thinking, Ann," he said slowly, "that it was a pity for Christa to be kept from dancing. She is young and light on her feet. God must have made her to dance." "Christa's well enough without it," said Ann, a little shortly. She thought more coldly of Christa since she had come up to a higher level herself. "Well, I only meant about Christa that I think I made a mistake," said Bart slowly.
"Father didn't mean to do any harm," she whispered hastily; "he's got no more sin on his soul than a child that gets angry and fights for what it wants. He's just like a child, father is; but it's been a lesson to him, and he'll never do it again. Think of the shame to Christa and me if he was hanged. And I've striven so to keep us respectable Bart, you know I have.
Christa stood bright and beautiful as a child of the morning, and heard the sentence of this long night passed upon her; but instead of looking plaintive, a curiously hard look of necessary acquiescence came about the lines of her cherry lips.
She had begun to hope that piety had loosened its grasp upon him for the time. "I don't know what's to become of us, Christa and me," she said despairingly; "if we don't take to drink it will be a wonder, everybody turning the cold shoulder on us." This was not her true thought at all.
"Oh, David!" she said; "I thought it was Christa." "But it isn't Christa," he stammered, grinning. He was hugely pleased with the idea that she had accepted his declaration of courtship. Half an hour later and Ann had the secret of the new track through the north of the drowned forest, and Brown had the wit not to ask her what she wanted to do with it.
He tried to approach the house with a nonchalant, happen-by-chance air, so that if any one saw him they would suppose his stopping merely accidental. Ann poured out his beer. Christa looked at him with eyes full of reproach. Then she got up and went away to the doorstep, and stood looking out. To the surprise of both of them, David did not follow her there. He stood still near Ann.
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