A more retired spot, a completer sequestration from the world of mart and
highway, it would have been hard to find. In the quiet of the early
morning, when the shadows of the trees lay across the dewy grass, it was
an angle of the earth as cloistral and withdrawn as heart of scholar or of
anchorite could wish. On one side of the house lay a tiny orchard, and the
windows of the living room looked out upon a mist of pink and white apple
blooms. The fragrance of the blossoms had been in the room, but could not
prevail against the odor of tobacco and rum lately introduced by the
master of the house and minister of the parish. Audrey, sitting beside a
table which had been drawn in front of the window, turned her face aside,
and was away, sense and soul, out of the meanly furnished room into the
midst of the great bouquets of bloom, with the blue between and above.
Darden, walking up and down, with his pipe in his mouth, and the tobacco
smoke curling like an aureole around his bullet head, glanced toward the
window.

"When you have written that which I have told you to write, say so,
Audrey," he commanded. "Don't sit there staring at nothing!"

Audrey came back to the present with a start, took up a pen, and drew the
standish nearer. "'Answer of Gideon Darden, Minister of Fair View Parish,
in Virginia, to the several Queries contained in my Lord Bishop of
London's Circular Letter to the Clergy in Virginia,'" she read, and poised
her pen in air.

"Read out the questions," ordered Darden, "and write my answer to each in
the space beneath. No blots, mind you, and spell not after the promptings
of your woman's nature."