“Yes, I did know it,” returned Thomas Merriam; “that’s the reason I haven’t called.”

“Cousin Evelina is not strong,” remarked the young girl, and there was a savor of apology in her tone.

“But—­” stammered Thomas; then he stopped again.  “May I—­has she any objections to—­anybody’s coming to see you?”

Evelina started.  “I am afraid Cousin Evelina would not approve,” she answered, primly.  Then she looked up in his face, and a girlish piteousness came into her own.  “I am very sorry,” she said, and there was a catch in her voice.

Thomas bent over her impetuously.  All his ministerial state fell from him like an outer garment of the soul.  He was young, and he had seen this girl Sunday after Sunday.  He had written all his sermons with her image before his eyes, he had preached to her, and her only, and she had come between his heart and all the nations of the earth in his prayers.  “Oh,” he stammered out, “I am afraid you can’t be very happy living there the way you do.  Tell me—­”

Evelina turned her face away with sudden haughtiness.  “My cousin Evelina is very kind to me, sir,” she said.

“But—­you must be lonesome with nobody—­of your own age—­to speak to,” persisted Thomas, confusedly.

“I never cared much for youthful company.  It is getting dark; I must be going,” said Evelina.  “I wish you good-evening, sir.”

“Sha’n’t I—­walk home with you?” asked Thomas, falteringly.

“It isn’t necessary, thank you, and I don’t think Cousin Evelina would approve,” she replied, primly; and her light dress fluttered away into the dusk and out of sight like the pale wing of a moth.

Poor Thomas Merriam walked on with his head in a turmoil.  His heart beat loud in his ears.  “I’ve made her mad with me,” he said to himself, using the old rustic school-boy vernacular, from which he did not always depart in his thoughts, although his ministerial dignity guarded his conversations.  Thomas Merriam came of a simple homely stock, whose speech came from the emotions of the heart, all unregulated by the usages of the schools.  He was the first for generations who had aspired to college learning and a profession, and had trained his tongue by the models of the educated and polite.  He could not help, at times, the relapse of his thoughts, and their speaking to himself in the dialect of his family and his ancestors.  “She’s ‘way above me, and I ought to ha’ known it,” he further said, with the meekness of an humble but fiercely independent race, which is meek to itself alone.  He would have maintained his equality with his last breath to an opponent; in his heart of hearts he felt himself below the scion of the one old gentle family of his native village.

This young Evelina, by the fine dignity which had been born with her and not acquired by precept and example, by the sweetly formal diction which seemed her native tongue, had filled him with awe.  Now, when he thought she was angered with him, he felt beneath her lady feet, his nostrils choked with a spiritual dust of humiliation.