[A Tale of a Lonely Parish by F. Marion Crawford]@TWC D-Link bookA Tale of a Lonely Parish CHAPTER XX 13/27
If convenient to you, would you come in the morning? I need not recommend discretion .-- Sincerely yours, "C.J.
JUXON. _N.B._--I am not hurt." Having ascertained that Reynolds was still in the kitchen, the missive was given to the old man with an injunction to use all speed, as the vicar might be going to bed and the note was important. John, meanwhile, being left alone sat down near the wounded man's bed and waited, glancing at the flushed face and staring eyes from time to time, and wondering whether the fellow would recover.
The young scholar had been startled by all that had occurred, and his ideas wandered back to the beginning of the evening, scarcely realising that a few hours ago he had not met Mrs.Goddard, had not experienced a surprising change in his feelings towards her, had not witnessed the strange scene under the trees.
It seemed as though all these things had occupied a week at the very least, whereas on that same afternoon he had been speculating upon his meeting with Mrs.Goddard, calling up her features to his mind as he had last seen them, framing speeches which when the meeting came he had not delivered, letting his mind run riot in the delicious anticipation of appearing before her in the light of a successful competitor for one of the greatest honours of English scholarship.
And yet in a few hours all his feelings were changed, and to his infinite surprise, were changed without any suffering to himself; he knew well that, for some reason, Mrs.Goddard had lost the mysterious power of making him blush, and of sending strange thrills through his whole nature when he sat at her side; with some justice he attributed his new indifference to the extraordinary alteration in her appearance, whereby she seemed now so much older than himself, and he forthwith moralised upon the mutability of human affairs, with all the mental fluency of a very young man whose affairs are still extremely mutable.
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