The Argosy — page 118: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Village Blacksnuth. 103 CHAPTER VI. MARK’S FOLLY. Ture Ryot Tempests travelled by easy stages, for neither father nor daughter was anxious to reach that now desolate home. Yet when at last they drove up to the Rectory gates, Vera felt a thrill of gladness, and for the first time since her mother’s death, realised that there was still something left to live for. The garden was brilliant with geraniums and calceolarias, the sun was shining brilliantly in an almost cloudless sky, so that all nature seemed to be smiling on her, and she almost felt as if she were waking from some dreadful dream as the carriage stopped at the door. There a pleasant surprise greeted her in the person of Norah Canter, who stood on the steps and clasped the motherless girl in her motherly arms, and almost carried the now sobbing Vera into the house. “Yes, Mr. Tempest,” said Mrs. Canter presently, ‘I knew Miss Vera would want me, so I made so bold as to come over yesterday, and got my niece, Janet, to go and look after the children and the washing for a week, while I take care of this poor motherless child. The clothes will suffer, I know, sir, especially the starched things ; but there, when a human heart is breaking you can’t be thinking of frilled petticoats and fine shirts.” And so for the next week Mrs. Canter did her best to fill up the gap Mrs. Tempest’s death had made, and was useful to Vera in many ways. She was an excellent listener, and was deeply interested in hearing all the details of Mrs. Tempest’s illness and death; details which it did Vera good to pour out. And when Vera confided to her the new interest Captain Raleigh’s acquaintance had brought into her life, she knew how to turn the conversation on him when the girl was plunged in grief for her mother. | And when, the day before she left, Vera showed her a letter she had received that morning from Captain Raleigh, in which he begged to offer her his sincere sympathy in her great sorrow, and hoped to have the pleasure of paying a visit to Woodford in the autumn, Mrs. Canter went home comforted about her, seeing that the new interest .in her life was an all-absorbing one, and that Vera, though stunned at first by grief, was rallying from the blow she had received. Vera also communicated to Norah what Mrs. Tempest had told her on her death-bed, and received the benefit of Mrs. Canter’s theological views in return. ‘If I were you, Miss Vera, I should not decide anything till I was going to be married, and then I should be whatever my husband was. I don’t hold with mixed marriages myself. Married folk must have their differences, of course, but there is one point they ought to think alike upon, and that is'religion ; as I told poor Canter. So, though he was born and bred a Methodist, when I married him, I took him to COMICHOOKS. Conn