“Done!  He has embraced the Scarlet Woman!”

“Dear me!” said the doctor, “so soon?  Is it anybody you knew here?—­not anybody’s wife?  Eh?”

“He has entered the Church of Rome,” said the Deacon, indignantly, “he has forsaken the God of his fathers for the tents of the idolaters; he is the consort of Papists and the slave of the Pope!”

“But are you sure?” said Dr. Duchesne, with perhaps less concern than before.

“Sure,” returned the Deacon angrily, “didn’t Brother Bulkley, on account of warning reports made by a God-fearing and soul-seeking teamster, make a special pilgrimage to this land of Sodom to inquire and spy out its wickedness?  Didn’t he find Stephen Masterton steeped in the iniquity of practicing on an organ—­he that scorned even a violin or harmonium in the tents of the Lord—­in an idolatrous chapel, with a foreign female Papist for a teacher?  Didn’t he find him a guest at the board of a Jesuit priest, visiting the schools of the Mission where this young Jezebel of a singer teaches the children to chant in unknown tongues?  Didn’t he find him living with a wrinkled Indian witch who called him ’Padrone’—­and speaking her gibberish?  Didn’t he find him, who left here a man mortified in flesh and spirit and pale with striving with sinners, fat and rosy from native wines and fleshpots, and even vain and gaudy in colored apparel?  And last of all, didn’t Brother Bulkley hear that a rumor was spread far and wide that this miserable backslider was to take to himself a wife—­in one of these strange women—­that very Jezebel who seduced him?  What do you call that?”

“It looks a good deal like human nature,” said the doctor, musingly, “but I call it a cure!”

THE INDISCRETION OF ELSBETH

The American paused.  He had evidently lost his way.  For the last half hour he had been wandering in a medieval town, in a profound medieval dream.  Only a few days had elapsed since he had left the steamship that carried him hither; and the accents of his own tongue, the idioms of his own people, and the sympathetic community of New World tastes and expressions still filled his mind until he woke up, or rather, as it seemed to him, was falling asleep in the past of this Old World town which had once held his ancestors.  Although a republican, he had liked to think of them in quaint distinctive garb, representing state and importance—­perhaps even aristocratic pre-eminence—­content to let the responsibility of such “bad eminence” rest with them entirely, but a habit of conscientiousness and love for historic truth eventually led him also to regard an honest Bauer standing beside his cattle in the quaint market place, or a kindly-faced black-eyed DIENSTMADCHEN in a doorway, with a timid, respectful interest, as a possible type of his progenitors.  For, unlike some of his traveling countrymen in Europe, he was not a snob, and it struck him—­as