ed Miss Henderson
if he might have one of her quaint, pleasant, old-fashioned rooms.

Miss Henderson was deliberating.

This very afternoon, she sat in the southwest tea parlor, with her
knitting forgotten in her lap, and her eyes searching the bright western
sky, as if for a gleam that should light her to decision.

"It ain't that I mind the trouble. And it ain't that there isn't house
room. And it ain't that I don't like the minister," soliloquized she.
"It's whether it would be respectable common sense. I ain't going to
take the field with the Gimps and the Leatherbees, nor to have them
think it, either. She's over here almost every blessed day of her life.
I might as well try to keep the sunshine out of the old house, as to
keep her; and I should be about as likely to want to do one as the
other. But just let me take in Mr. Armstrong, and there'd be all the
eyes in the village watching. There couldn't so much as a cat walk in or
out, but they'd know it, somehow. And they'd be sure to say she was
running after the minister."

Miss Henderson's pronouns were not precise in their reference. It isn't
necessary for soliloquy to be exact. She understood herself, and that
sufficed.

"It would be a disgrace to the parish, anyhow," she resumed, "to let
those Gimps and Leatherbees get him into their net; and they'll do it if
Providence or somebody don't interpose. I wish I was sure whether it was
a leading or not!"

By and by she reverted, at last, as she always did, to that question of
its being a "leading," or not; and, taking down the old Bible from the
corner shelf, she laid it with solemnity on the little light stand at
her side, and opened it, as she had known her father do, in the
important crises of his life, for an "indication."

The wooden saddle and the gun were not all that had come down to Aunt
Faith from the primitive days of the Puritan settlers.

The leaves parted at the story of the Good Samaritan. Bible leaves are
apt to part, as the heart opens, in accordance with long habit and holy
use.

That evening, while Glory was washing up the tea things, Aunt Faith put
on cloak and hood, and walked over to Cross Corners.

"No--I won't take off my things," she replied to Mrs. Gartney's advance
of assistance. "I've just come over to tell you what I'm going to do.
I've made up my mind to take the minister to board. And when the washing
and ironing's out of the way, next week, I shall fix up a room for him,