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THE SEVENTH DAY.
FINE enough for our guest to go out again. Long, feathery lines
of white cloud are waving upward in the sky, a sign of coming
wind.
There was a steamer telegraphed yesterday from the West Indies.
When the next vessel is announced from abroad, will it be
George's ship?
I don't know how my brothers feel to-day, but the sudden
cessation of my own literary labors has left me still in bad
spirits. I tried to occupy my mind by reading, but my attention
wandered. I went out into the garden, but it looked dreary; the
autumn flowers were few and far between--the lawn was soaked and
sodden with yesterday's rain. I wandered into Owen's room. He had
returned to his painting, but was not working, as it struck me,
with his customary assiduity and his customary sense of
enjoyment.
We had a long talk together about George and Jessie and the
future. Owen urged me to risk speaking of my son in her presence
once more, on the chance of making her betray herself on a second
occasion, and I determined to take his advice. But she was in
such high spirits when she came home to dinner on this Seventh
Day, and seemed so incapable, for the time being, of either
feeling or speaking seriously, that I thought it wiser to wait
till her variable mood altered again with the next wet day.
The number drawn this evening was Eight, being the number of the
story which it had cost Owen so much labor to write. He looked a
little fluttered and anxious as he opened the manuscript. This
was the first occasion on which his ability as a narrator was to
be brought to the test, and I saw him glance nervously at
Jessie's attentive face.
"I need not trouble you with much in the way of preface," he
said. "This is the story of a very remarkable event in the life
of one of my brother clergymen. He and I became acquainted
through being associated with each other in the management of a
Missionary Society. I saw him for the last time in London when he
was about to leave his country and his friends forever, and was
then informed of the circumstances which have afforded the
material for this narrative."
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