He was not at all grateful to the Rector
for telling him the story--quite the reverse. It altered his mental
attitude towards his secretary; introduced disturbing ideas, which
he had no use for. He had taken for granted that she was one of
those single women of the present day whose intellectual interests
are enough for them, who have never really felt the call of passion,
and can be trusted to look at life sensibly without taking love and
marriage into account. To think of Miss Bremerton as having suffered
severely from a love-affair--broken her heart, and injured her
health over it--was most distracting. If it had happened once--why,
of course, it might happen again. She was not immune; in spite of
all her gifts, she was susceptible, and it was a horrid nuisance.
He went home all on edge, what with the adventure of the gates, the
encounter with the engineer fellow, and now the revelations of the
Rector.
As he approached the house, he saw from the old clock in the gable
of the northern front that it was two o'clock.
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