“But I’m not the kind of person, at all.  I’m not saving, I’m not thrifty.”

“I hope you’re wrong—­but even if you’re not, well, I want you terrible hard just the same.  You see I can always keep an eye on the expenses,” he hastened to add, and made a desperate clutch at her hand.

The red worsted mitten came off in his grasp, and he stood eyeing it ruefully while he waited for her answer.

“I’ve determined never, never to marry,” she replied.

His chest heaved.  “I knew you felt that way about the other’s but I thought somehow I was different,” he rejoined.

“No, it’s not the man, but marriage that I don’t like,” she responded, shaking her head.  “It’s all work an’ no play wherever I’ve seen it.”

“It’s terrible for a woman to feel like that, an’ goes against God an’ nature,” he answered.  “Have you ever tried prayin’ over it?”

“No, I’ve never tried that, because you see, I don’t really mind it very much.  Please give me my glove now, here is Judy’s cottage.”

“But promise me first that you’ll try prayin’ over your state of mind, an’ that I may go on hopin’ that you will change it?”

Turning with her hand still outstretched for the glove, she glanced roguishly from his face to the shuttered window of the Hatch cottage.

“Oh, I don’t mind your hoping,” she answered, composing her expression to demureness, “if only you won’t hope—­very hard.”

Then, leaving him overwhelmed by his emotions, she tripped up the narrow walk, bordered by stunted rose-bushes, to the crumbling porch of Solomon’s house.  At the door a bright new gig, with red wheels, caught her eye, and before the mischievous dimples had fled from her cheek, she ran into the arms of the Reverend Orlando Mullen.

Her confusion brought a beautiful colour into his cheeks, while, in a chivalrous effort to shield her from further embarrassment, he turned his eyes to the face of Judy Hatch, which was lifted at his side like the rapt countenance of one of the wan-featured, adoring saints of a Fra Angelico painting.  No one—­not even the nurse of his infancy—­had ever imputed a fault either to his character or to his deportment; for he had come into the world endowed with an infallible instinct for the commonplace.  In any profession he would have won success as a shining light of mediocrity, since the ruling motive of his conduct was less the ambition to excel than the moral inability to be peculiar.  His mind was small and solemn, and he had worn three straight and unyielding wrinkles across his forehead in his earnest endeavour to prevent people from acting, and especially from thinking, lightly.  This sedulous devotion to the public morals kept him not only a trifle spare in figure, but lent an habitual manner of divine authority to his most trivial utterance.  His head, seen from the rear, was a little flat, but this, fortunately, did not show in the pulpit—­where at the age of twenty-four his eloquence enraptured his congregation.