The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance

sunshine to the house fronts of the opposite side, with their small shops closed, the blinds drawn down and everything denoting the respectable lifelessness of the Sabbath.... At this awkward pause John Baines issued from the vestry door of the chapel, Mrs. Garrett nodded good-naturedly, and went her way. John was about four-and-twenty—Lucy's age. He was a little over the average height but ungainly, with rather sloping shoulders, long arms, large hands and feet; a face with not well-formed features; nose coarse, fleshy, blunt-tipped; mouth wide, with his father's long upper lip, on which were the beginnings of a flaxen moustache, with tame ends curling down to meet the upward growth of the young beard. He had an under lip that was merely a band of pink skin round the mouth, without an inward curve to break its union with the broad chin. His teeth were strong and white but irregular in setting, the canines being thrust out of position. His eyes were blue-grey, and not without a pleasant twinkle. The hair was too long for tidiness, not long enough for eccentric saintliness. It was a yellow brown and was continued down the cheeks in a silken beard from ear to ear, the tangled, unclipped, uncared-for beard of a young man who has never shaved. His fresh pink-and-white complexion was marred here and there with the pimples and blotches of adolescence. Lucy, however, thought him good to look at; he only wanted a little smartening up, which she promised herself to impart to him when they were married. He looked what he was: a good-hearted, simple-minded, unintellectual Englishman, an Anglo-Saxon, with a hearty appetite for plain food, a love of cricket, who would with little difficulty remain in all things chaste and sober; slow to wrath, but, if really pushed against the wall, able to show berserker rage. Having taken up a religious career he had acquired a certain pomposity of manner which sat ill on his boyishness; he had to remember in intervals of games or country dances or flirtations that he had been set apart for the Lord's work. But he would make an excellent husband. His class has furnished quite the best type of colonist abroad. John gave his arm silently to Lucy, who took it with a gesture of affection, and patted it once or twice with her kid-gloved hand, which lover-like demonstrations John accepted rather…