I thought thus, because I saw that in her own nature were truth and
goodness. And she was quick of perception. I was often struck by the
shrewdness of her remarks. I thought the more favorably of her, too,
that she was fond of pictures. Before they came to live in the other
part, she had taken a dozen lessons of an itinerant drawing-master. I
had often encountered her in my walks, trying to make a sketch of a tree
or a house. She always tucked it behind her, though, or into her pocket,
the minute I came in sight.
It was certainly true that she had not yielded to the fascinations of
the Doctor's boy so readily and so entirely as I had feared. "The girl
has some common sense," I thought, "some stability,--and likewise some
ideas of the eternal fitness of things." For I noticed, with pleasure,
one night in Emily's room, when somebody said, "There comes the Doctor's
boy," that she got up and closed the door.
She had been singing the old-fashioned hymn commencing,--
"On the fair Heavenly Hills."
The last line,
"And all the air is Love,"
was repeated. The music was peculiar,--the notes rising and falling and
rolling over each other like waves.
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