"Here is Shepherd," I said, "with a clerical sore-throat, and forced to
give up his duty for a whole summer. He writes to ask me whether, as he
understands I have a curate as good as myself--that is what the old fellow
says--it might not suit me to take my family to his place for the summer.
He assures me I should like it, and that it would do us all good. His
house, he says, is large enough to hold us, and he knows I should not like
to be without duty wherever I was. And so on Read the letter for yourself,
and turn it over in your mind. Weir will come back so fresh and active that
it will be no oppression to him to take the whole of the duty here. I will
run and ask Turner whether it would be safe to move Connie, and whether the
sea-air would be good for her."
"One would think you were only twenty, husband--you make up your mind so
quickly, and are in such a hurry."
The fact was, a vision of the sea had rushed in upon me. It was many years
since I had seen the sea, and the thought of looking on it once more, in
its most glorious show, the Atlantic itself, with nothing between us and
America, but the round of the ridgy water, had excited me so that my wife's
reproof, if reproof it was, was quite necessary to bring me to my usually
quiet and sober senses.
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