The ensuing week went by with a buzz and whirl, circling about Theron Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge, impalpable teetotum sent spinning under Sister Soulsby's resolute hands.Whenever his vagrant memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling, and ended with a shudder of repulsion.
It was a week crowded with events, which seemed to him to shoot past so swiftly that in effect they came all of a heap.He never essayed the task, in retrospect, of arranging them in their order of sequence.
They had, however, a definite and interdependent chronology which it is worth the while to trace.
Mrs.Soulsby brought her trunk round to the parsonage bright and early on Friday morning, and took up her lodgement in the best bedroom, and her headquarters in the house at large, with a cheerful and business-like manner.
She desired nothing so much, she said, as that people should not put themselves out on her account, or allow her to get in their way.She appeared to mean this, too, and to have very good ideas about securing its realization.
During both Friday and the following day, indeed, Theron saw her only at the family meals.There she displayed a hearty relish for all that was set before her which quite won Mrs.Ware's heart, and though she talked rather more than Theron found himself expecting from a woman, he could not deny that her conversation was both seemly and entertaining.
She had evidently been a great traveller, and referred to things she had seen in Savannah or Montreal or Los Angeles in as matter-of-fact fashion as he could have spoken of a visit to Tecumseh.Theron asked her many questions about these and other far-off cities, and her answers were all so pat and showed so keen and clear an eye that he began in spite of himself to think of her with a certain admiration.