Hills of the Shatemuc eBook

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“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you know?”

“You don’t like everything that I like,” said her brother.

“Why yes I do! — Don’t I?”

“Not everything.”

“What don’t I?”

“Euripides — and Plato.”

“Ah but I don’t understand those,” said Winnie.

Winthrop was silent. Was that what he meant? — was Winnie’s instant thought. Very disagreeable. And his ‘yes’s’ were so quiet — they told nothing. Winnie looked at her brother’s hand again, or rather at Miss Haye in her brother’s hand; and Winthrop pursued his own meditations.

“Governor,” said Winnie after a while, “is Miss Haye a Christian?”

“No.”

Winnie asked no more; partly because she did not dare, and partly because the last answer had given her so much to think of. She did not know why, either, and she would have given a great deal to hear it over again. In that little word and the manner of it, there had been so much to quiet and to disquiet her. Undoubtedly Winnie would have done anything in the world, that she could, to make Miss Haye a Christian; and yet, there was a strange sort of relief in hearing Winthrop say that word; and at the same time a something in the way he said it that told her her relief had uncertain foundation. The ‘no’ had not been spoken like the ‘yes’ — it came out half under breath; what meaning lurked about it Winnie could not make out; she puzzled herself to think; but though she could not wish it had been a willing ‘no,’ she wished it had been any other than it had. She could not ask any more; and Winthrop’s face when he went to his reading was precisely what it was other evenings. But Winnie’s was not; and she went to bed and got up with a sore spot in her heart, and a resolution that she would not like Miss Haye, for she would not know her well enough to make sure that she could.