“Oh, Louis, will you? I am so glad, so proud!” and again the little hands pressed his arm, and Marian looked up to him with her radiant face. He had not felt before how perfectly magnanimous and noble his resolution was.
“I think it will be very right,” said Agnes, who was not so enthusiastic; “and my father will be pleased to see you, Louis, though you doubt him as you doubt all men. But look, who is this coming here?”
They were scarcely coming here, seeing they were standing still under the porch of the church, a pair of very tall figures, very nearly equal in altitude, though much unlike each other. One of them was the Rector, who stood with a solemn bored look at the door of his church, which he had just closed, listening, without any answer save now and then a grave and ceremonious bow, to the other “individual,” who was talking very fluently, and sufficiently loud to be heard by others than the Rector. “Oh, Agnes!” cried Marian, and “Hush, May!” answered her sister; they both recognised the stranger at a glance.
“Yes, this is the pride of the old country,” said the voice; “here, sir, we can still perceive upon the sands of time the footprints of our Saxon ancestors. I say ours, for my youthful and aspiring nation boasts as the brightest star in her banner the Anglo-Saxon blood. _We_ preserve the free institutions--the hatred of superstition, the freedom of private judgment and public opinion, the great inheritance developed out of the past; but Old England, sir, a land which I venerate, yet pity, keeps safe in her own bosom the external traces full of instruction, the silent poetry of Time--that only poetry which she can refuse to share with us.”
To this suitable and appropriate speech, congenial as it must have been to his feelings, the Rector made no answer, save that most deferential and solemn bow, and was proceeding with a certain conscientious haughtiness to show his visitor some other part of the building, when his eye was attracted by the approaching group. He turned to them immediately with an air of sudden relief.
So did Mr Endicott, to whom, to do him justice, not all the old churches in Banburyshire, nor all the opportunities of speechmaking, nor even half-a-dozen rectors who were within two steps of a peerage, could have presented such powerful attractions as did that beautiful blushing face of Marian Atheling, drooping and falling back under the shadow of Louis. The Yankee hastened forward with his best greeting.