seemed to isolate her alone with him, and now seemed to uplift her, as
on a pillory, before the congregation. For Archie continued to drink
her in with his eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a
mountain, and stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable. In
the cleft of her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and the pale
florets of primrose fascinated him. He saw the breasts heave, and the
flowers shake with the heaving, and marvelled what should so much
discompose the girl. And Christina was conscious of his gaze - saw it,
perhaps, with the dainty plaything of an ear that peeped among her
ringlets; she was conscious of changing colour, conscious of her
unsteady breath. Like a creature tracked, run down, surrounded, she
sought in a dozen ways to give herself a countenance. She used her
handkerchief - it was a really fine one - then she desisted in a panic:
"He would only think I was too warm." She took to reading in the
metrical psalms, and then remembered it was sermon-time. Last she put a
"sugar-bool" in her mouth, and the next moment repented of the step. It
was such a homely-like thing! Mr. Archie would never be eating sweeties
in kirk; and, with a palpable effort, she swallowed it whole, and her
colour flamed high. At this signal of distress Archie awoke to a sense
of his ill-behaviour. What had he been doing? He had been exquisitely
rude in church to the niece of his housekeeper; he had stared like a
lackey and a libertine at a beautiful and modest girl. It was possible,
it was even likely, he would be presented to her after service in the
kirk-yard, and then how was he to look? And there was no excuse. He
had marked the tokens of her shame, of her increasing indignation, and
he was such a fool that he had not understood them. Shame bowed him
down, and he looked resolutely at Mr. Torrance; who little supposed,
good, worthy man, as he continued to expound justification by faith,
what was his true business: to play the part of derivative to a pair of
children at the old game of falling in love.