It was an odd way that Sandy went to work to win her: his ways had been
odd all his life,--so odd that it had long ago been accepted in the
minds of the Charlottetown people that he would never find a woman to
wed him; only now and then an unusually perspicacious person divined
that the reason of his bachelorhood was not at all that women did not
wish to wed him, spite of his odd ways, but that he himself found no
woman exactly to his taste.
True it was that Sandy Bruce, aged forty, had never yet desired any
woman for his wife till he looked into the face of Little Bel in the
Wissan Bridge school-house. And equally true was it that before the last
strains of "Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled" had died away on that
memorable afternoon of her exhibition of her school, he had determined
that his wife she should be.
This was the way he took to win her. No one can deny that it was odd.
There was some talk between him and his temporary colleague on the
School Board, old Dalgetty, as they drove home together behind the brisk
Norwegian ponies; and the result of this conversation was that the next
morning early--in fact, before Little Bel was dressed, so late had she
been indulged, for once, in sleeping, after her hard labors in the
exhibition the day before--the Norwegian ponies were jingling their
bells at John McDonald's door; and John himself might have been seen,
with a seriously puzzled face, listening to words earnestly spoken by
Sandy, as he shook off the snow and blanketed the ponies.
Pages:
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195