Read Put on the Armour of Light for Free Online Page A

that.”
    â€œWell, that’s just the point, sir. He’ll turn her head with his carriages and clothes and oyster suppers and then he’ll be on to the next flower and she’ll be left alone and disappointed.”
    â€œI’m sure Maggie would be delighted with the bee analogy, but to extend it further, she may well be disappointed — but only until the next bee happens along.” Dr. Skene clapped him amicably on the back. “No, Charles, if Maggie has tender feelings for Trevor Martland, I’m sure I would know about it.”
    Thinking back to what his own parents had known of his doings as a young man, Charles was not reassured. He bid Dr. Skene goodnight and began the walk back to his rooms, pulling his hat low over his eyes and stuffing his hands in his pockets. A thin crescent moon had risen in the southeast over the Assiniboine River. As he passed by the rows of tall, narrow houses, some with their curtains still open, he saw a quick series of little dramas: shadowy figures in conversation on a verandah, a hand languidly sweeping a fan, the sudden brightening red dot of a lit cigar; in a foyer through a screen door he glimpsed a child who couldn’t sleep being cajoled back to bed by her mother; at a dining room table, a tired man stripped to his shirt and suspenders reading the newspaper by lamplight. There was the distant sound of dishes being stacked for the next day, the fizzy hiss from the filaments of the electric lamps at street corners, the satisfying musical ring of his heels on the wooden planks of the sidewalk.
    The sound of a door opening high above his head made him look up. Someone, a woman in a light-coloured dress, had come out onto the balcony above the verandah three houses ahead. He slowed his pace. She was leaning on the railing, with her head thrown slightly back, taking in the scent of lilac. Pretty; maybe very pretty. As Charles came closer, a dark shape materialized behind her, which resolved itself into a man. Now he’s spoiled it, Charles thought. Now she’ll go in — and sure enough, she did. Watch out, there, Lauchlan, my lad. Or you’ll have to recite Psalm 100 backwards again. Last time it had been the hired girl bent over the laundry tubs, the intoxicating movement beneath her skirts as she scrubbed. Better stop it right there. If it was marrying or burning, he would have to choose the latter for a while yet, no matter if he was thirty-two. Because with marrying you got a wife, infants, in-laws, mortgages, and other encumbrances that he didn’t have time for right now.
    As a distraction he began to review the evening’s strange events in his mind, sifting through the information he knew while crossing the bridge over Colony Creek. He took the shortcut across the driving park, opposite the ornate wooden facade of the Fort Osborne Barracks drill hall where he heard the occasional snuffling of the army horses in their stalls.
    Charles rented part of the second floor of Mrs. Gough’s two-and-a-half-storey cedar shake and clapboard house at 315 Edmonton Street, just north of the dusty, track-rutted breadth of Portage Avenue. He had a bedroom and a small sitting room that he also used as a study. He shared a bathroom with Mr. Krause, the third-floor tenant, and took his meals, when he was there to share them, with Mrs. Gough and her children, Bertie, Hilda, and Dottie. If, as was more often the case, he arrived home late in the evening, his landlady kindly warmed something for him and hovered, telling him the news of the neighbourhood as he ate. He got a slight discount on his rent by cutting kindling for the stove and, in the winter, giving the furnace its final filling with coal before he went to bed.
    He swung open the wrought-iron gate at the end of Mrs. Gough’s walk, having progressed in his thoughts to the finer points of his sermon for the coming Sunday — and found himself pushed roughly sideways into the