again engaged in athletic sports, but she seemed oblivious
of these. At last she turned to him again with an illumining smile.

"But I was dead in love once before that, and that's how I know just
how you feel about Baxter. He was the preacher where we used to go to
church. He was a good one. Pa copied a lot of his stuff that he uses
to this day if he happens to get a preacher part. He was the loveliest
thing. Not so young, but dark, with wonderful eyes and black hair, and
his voice would go all through you. I had an awful case on him. I was
twelve, and all week I used to think how I'd see him the next Sunday.
Say, when I'd get there and he'd be working--doing pulpit stuff--he'd
have me in kind of a trance.

"Sometimes after the pulpit scene he'd come down right into the audience
and shake hands with people. I'd almost keel over if he'd notice me. I'd
be afraid if he would and afraid if he wouldn't. If he said 'And how
is the little lady this morning?' I wouldn't have a speck of voice to
answer him. I'd just tremble all over. I used to dream I'd get a job
workin' for him as extra, blacking his shoes or fetching his breakfast
and things.

"It was the real thing, all right. I used to try to pray the way he
did--asking the Lord to let me do a character bit or something with him.
He had me going all right. You must 'a' been that way about Baxter.
Sure you were. When you found she was married and used a double and
everything, it was like I'd found this preacher shooting hop or using a
double in his pulpit stuff."

She was still again, looking back upon this tremendous episode.

"Yes, that's about the way I felt," he told her. Already his affair
with Mrs. Rosenblatt seemed a thing of his childhood. He was wondering,
rather, if the preacher could have been the perfect creature the girl
was now picturing him. It would not have displeased him to learn that
this refulgent being had actually used a double in his big scenes, or
had been guilty of mere human behaviour at odd moments. Probably, after
all, he had been just a preacher. "Uncle Sylvester used to want me to be
a preacher," he said, with apparent irrelevance, "even if he was his own
worst enemy." He added presently, as the girl remained silent, "I always
say my prayers at night." He felt vaguely that this might raise him to
the place of the other who had been adored. He was wishing to be thought
well of by this girl.

She was aroused from her musing by his confessio