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Once, when his demeanour towards the new servant had strongly suggested that he thought her name was Bathsheba, Mrs Nixon herself had `flown out' at him, and there had been a scene which the doctor had soothed by discreet professional explanations. Maggie's difficulty was that he was always there, always on the spot.
She suggested that, about marriage, ideas, as he called them, might differ; with which, however, giving no more time to it, she sounded another question. "Don't you appear rather to put it to me that I may accept your offer for Maggie's sake? Somehow" she turned it over "I don't so clearly SEE her quite so much finding reassurance, or even quite so much needing it."
Maggie knew the drift of his thoughts, and she hastened her preparations for tea; for though it is a humiliating thing to admit, the most sacred of our griefs are not independent of mere physical comforts. David's and Maggie's sorrow was a deep and poignant one, but the refreshing tea and cake and fish were at least the vehicle of consolation.
Maggie's mother paced to and fro, addressing the doorful of eyes, expounding like a glib showman at a museum. Her voice rang through the building. "Dere she stands," she cried, wheeling suddenly and pointing with dramatic finger. "Dere she stands! Lookut her! Ain' she a dindy? An' she was so good as to come home teh her mudder, she was! Ain' she a beaut'? Ain' she a dindy? Fer Gawd's sake!"
She could be back again before she was missed, and, in fact, could join her companions in the girls' sitting-room long before the leisure hours had expired. The days were now getting very short, but this fact was in Maggie's favor rather than otherwise. She ran downstairs unnoticed by any one, opened a side-door which was used as a tradesmen's entrance, and got into the street.
The imprint of Maggie's coin and of her attempts at salvage were at the edge and quite distinct from the others. I lifted the jar and picked up the paper. It was folded and refolded until it was not much larger than a thumb-nail, a rather stiff paper crossed with faint blue lines.
Certainly one of the persons about whom Maggie's fears were furthest from troubling themselves was her aunt Pullet, on whom, seeing that she did not live in St. Ogg's, and was neither sharp-eyed nor sharp-tempered, it would surely have been quite whimsical of them to fix rather than on aunt Glegg. And yet the channel of fatality the pathway of the lightning was no other than aunt Pullet.
Philip paused with a pang of dread lest his confession should cut short this very happiness, a pang of the same dread that had kept his love mute through long months. A rush of self-consciousness told him that he was besotted to have said all this. Maggie's manner this morning had been as unconstrained and indifferent as ever. But she was not looking indifferent now.
"The enemy shouteth ... The enemy shouteth ..." Skeaton sat enraptured. Women let the tears stream down their faces, men blew their noses. Once again the voice arose. "Hear my prayer, Oh, God, incline Thine ear ..." It was Maggie's voice, Maggie's cry.
The little hat she wore on her head was made of brown straw trimmed very simply with ribbon; it was an ugly hat, but on Maggie's head it seemed to complete her dress, to be a part of her, so that no one noticed in the least what she wore except that she looked all right. Two boys with worshiping eyes watched the trio as they stepped down the rectory avenue and disappeared from view.
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