pleasing vision.

Not once had Ambrose Thompson left her side, yet he had been uncommonly
silent. Thoughts, rose coloured as a boy's dream of a holiday, were
floating before his mind's eye; he had been but dimly conscious that two
plates of warm soup had lately flowed into him the while the
conversation around him flowed on unceasingly. For the spirit of
romance, which is an eternal though elusive thing, was surely taking
fresh hold on him this evening as his pillar of cloud by day and of fire
by night, and only Miner Hobbs, the little wooden figure of a man seated
several tables off, was yet aware of his friend's exalted state.

At the present moment the Rev. Elias Tupper was talking to the widow. He
had but lately traversed the room crowded with tables and resplendent
with decorations of harvest apples, pumpkins, goldenrod and tall
tasselled stalks of corn, dispensing pleasantries as one would
lollipops; and now amid much joking, laughter, and nudging had been
allowed to take his place next the widow, only the legislator, who was
making but a few weeks' visit in Pennyroyal, appearing disquieted.

It was past seven o'clock and assuredly the new Baptist Sunday-school
room was now the centre of Pennyroyal's social activities, when
unexpectedly the tall figure of a boy lurched into the room--Pennyroyal's
black sheep, a boy taller than any man in the village save Ambrose
Thompson.

There was a dismayed flutter and then an uncomfortable silence.

Now there are black sheep and black sheep with extenuating
circumstances, but this boy had none of the extenuating circumstances--a
respectable family, money in the bank, or a line of distinguished but
self-indulgent ancestors; no, he was simply a sandy-haired,
loose-jointed boy of about twenty-one who worked about the Widow
Tarwater's stables--one of nature's curious anomalies, a boy without a
father.

He looked about the homely, cheerful company at first with defiance, and
then, feeling the weight of his loneliness and degradation, fell to
crying foolishly. "I don't see why I ain't a right to your church
social; if I ain't no name of my own, I got to be the son of some man in
this town!"

It was such a sudden, unlooked for accusation piercing the holy covering
of every hard-shelled Baptist brother in the new Sunday-school room that
for the moment the little group of men were staggered. Then while they
were making up their minds as to which one should have the privilege of