"
"It's the first--the very first--time she ever took that draggin' child
out of my arms for an instant," the Ensign remarked to her husband and
next in command later in the evening, but she resigned the infant
without protest at the time. Laura carried him into her own room with
something like gaiety, and there repeated to him more nursery rhymes,
dating from secular Putney, than she would have believed she remembered.
The Believers' Rally, as will be understood, was a gathering of some
selectness. If the Chinaman came, it was because of the vagueness of his
reception of the privileges he claimed; and his ignorance of all tongues
but his own left no medium for turning him out. Qualms of conscience,
however, kept all Miss Rozario's young lady friends away, and these
also, doubtless, operated to detain Duff Lindsay. One does not attend a
Believers' Rally unless one's personal faith extends beyond the lady in
command of it, and one specially refrains if one's spiritual condition
is a delicate and debatable matter with her. In Wellesley square, later
in the evening, the conditions were different. It would not be easy to
imagine a scene that suggested greater liberality of sentiment.
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