“I’m sure,” remarked Alice, “I should have been mortified to death if he had come. We lost the extension-leaf to our table in moving, and four is all it’ll seat decently.”
Sister Soulsby smiled winningly into the wife’s honest face. “Don’t you see, dear,” she explained patiently, “I only asked him because I knew he couldn’t come. A little butter spreads a long way, if it’s only intelligently warmed.”
“It was certainly very ingenious of you,” Theron began almost stiffly. Then he yielded to the humanities, and with a kindling smile added, “And it was as kind as kind could be. I’m afraid you’re wrong about it’s doing me any good, but I can see how well you meant it, and I’m grateful.”
“We could have sneaked in the kitchen table, perhaps, while he was out in the garden, and put on the extra long tablecloth,” interjected Alice, musingly.
Sister Soulsby smiled again at Sister Ware, but without any words this time; and Alice on the instant rose, with the remark that she must be going out to see about supper.
“I’m going to insist on coming out to help you,” Mrs. Soulsby declared, “as soon as I’ve talked over one little matter with your husband. Oh, yes, you must let me this time. I insist!”
As the kitchen door closed behind Mrs. Ware, a swift and apparently significant glance shot its way across from Sister Soulsby’s roving, eloquent eyes to the calmer and smaller gray orbs of her husband. He rose to his feet, made some little explanation about being a gardener himself, and desiring to inspect more closely some rhododendrons he had noticed in the garden, and forthwith moved decorously out by the other door into the front hall. They heard his footsteps on the gravel beneath the window before Mrs. Soulsby spoke again.
“You’re right about the Presiding Elder, and you’re wrong,” she said. “He isn’t what one might call precisely in love with you. Oh, I know the story—how you got into debt at Tyre, and he stepped in and insisted on your being denied Tecumseh and sent here instead.”
“He was responsible for that, then, was he?” broke in Theron, with contracted brows.
“Why, don’t you make any effort to find out anything at all?” she asked pertly enough, but with such obvious good-nature that he could not but have pleasure in her speech. “Why, of course he did it! Who else did you suppose?”
“Well,” said the young minister, despondently, “if he’s as much against me as all that, I might as well hang up my fiddle and go home.”
Sister Soulsby gave a little involuntary groan of impatience. She bent forward, and, lifting her eyes, rolled them at him in a curve of downward motion which suggested to his fancy the image of two eagles in a concerted pounce upon a lamb.
“My friend,” she began, with a new note of impressiveness in her voice, “if you’ll pardon my saying it, you haven’t got the spunk of a mouse. If you’re going to lay down, and let everybody trample over you just as they please, you’re right! You might as well go home. But now here, this is what I wanted to say to you: Do you just keep your hands off these next few days, and leave this whole thing to me. I’ll pull it into shipshape for you. No—wait a minute—don’t interrupt now. I have taken a liking to you. You’ve got brains, and you’ve got human nature in you, and heart. What you lack is sabe—common sense. You’ll get that, too, in time, and meanwhile I’m not going to stand by and see you cut up and fed to the dogs for want of it. I’ll get you through this scrape, and put you on your feet again, right-side-up-with care, because, as I said, I like you. I like your wife, too, mind. She’s a good, honest little soul, and she worships the very ground you tread on. Of course, as long as people will marry in their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up together. But that’s neither here nor there. She’s a kind sweet little body, and she’s devoted to you, and it isn’t every intellectual man that gets even that much. But now it’s a go, is it? You promise to keep quiet, do you, and leave the whole show absolutely to me? Shake hands on it.”
Sister Soulsby had risen, and stood now holding out her hand in a frank, manly fashion. Theron looked at the hand, and made mental notes that there were a good many veins discernible on the small wrist, and that the forearm seemed to swell out more than would have been expected in a woman producing such a general effect of leanness. He caught the shine of a thin bracelet-band of gold under the sleeve. A delicate, significant odor just hinted its presence in the air about this outstretched arm—something which was not a perfume, yet deserved as gracious a name.
He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a deliberate gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible arguments for and against this momentous compact.
“I promise,” he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves together in an earnest clasp.
“Right you are,” exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity. “Mind, when it’s all over, I’m going to give you a good, serious, downright talking to—a regular hoeing-over. I’m not sure I shan’t give you a sound shaking into the bargain. You need it. And now I’m going out to help Alice.”
The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had left the room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of abstraction. He strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by the window, and stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother Soulsby, who was bending over and attentively regarding some pink blossoms on a shrub through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying-glass.
What remained uppermost
