“Suppose she gets married to somebody else?”

“Well, you know, I shouldn’t cast eye on a woman who was a fool.”

“Well, upon my—­” Anthony checked his exclamation, returning to the charge with, “Just suppose, for the sake of supposing—­supposing she was a fool, and gone and got married, and you thrown back’ard on one leg, starin’ at the other, stupified-like?”

“I don’t mind supposing it,” said Robert.  “Say, she’s a fool.  Her being a fool argues that I was one in making a fool’s choice.  So, she jilts me, and I get a pistol, or I get a neat bit of rope, or I take a clean header with a cannon-ball at my heels, or I go to the chemist’s and ask for stuff to poison rats,—­anything a fool’d do under the circumstances, it don’t matter what.”

Old Anthony waited for Rhoda to jump over a stile, and said to her,—­

“He laughs at the whole lot of ye.”

“Who?” she asked, with betraying cheeks.

“This Mr. Robert Armstrong of yours.”

“Of mine, uncle!”

“He don’t seem to care a snap o’ the finger for any of ye.”

“Then, none of us must care for him, uncle.”

“Now, just the contrary.  That always shows a young fellow who’s attending to his business.  If he’d seen you boil potatoes, make dumplings, beds, tea, all that, you’d have had a chance.  He’d have marched up to ye before you was off to London.”

“Saying, ‘You are the woman.’” Rhoda was too desperately tickled by the idea to refrain from uttering it, though she was angry, and suffering internal discontent.  “Or else, ‘You are the cook,’” she muttered, and shut, with the word, steel bars across her heart, calling him, mentally, names not justified by anything he had said or done—­such as mercenary, tyrannical, and such like.

Robert was attentive to her in church.  Once she caught him with his eyes on her face; but he betrayed no confusion, and looked away at the clergyman.  When the text was given out, he found the place in his Bible, and handed it to her pointedly—­“There shall be snares and traps unto you;” a line from Joshua.  She received the act as a polite pawing civility; but when she was coming out of church, Robert saw that a blush swept over her face, and wondered what thoughts could be rising within her, unaware that girls catch certain meanings late, and suffer a fiery torture when these meanings are clear to them.  Rhoda called up the pride of her womanhood that she might despise the man who had dared to distrust her.  She kept her poppy colour throughout the day, so sensitive was this pride.  But most she was angered, after reflection, by the doubts which Robert appeared to cast on Dahlia, in setting his finger upon that burning line of Scripture.  It opened a whole black kingdom to her imagination, and first touched her visionary life with shade.  She was sincere in her ignorance that the doubts were her own, but they lay deep in unawakened recesses of the soul; it was by a natural action of her reason that she transferred and forced them upon him who had chanced to make them visible.