g this meal, and the next, and
when they passed upon the stairway. He had a confusingly contradictory
face, had the Reverend Herbert E. Pyecroft--for such she learned
was his full name; a face customarily sedate and elderish, and then,
almost without perceptible change, for swift moments oddly youthful;
with a wide mouth, which would suddenly twist up at its right
corner as though from some unholy quip of humor, and whose as sudden
straightening into a solemn line would show that the unseemly humor
had been exorcised. In manner he was bland, ornate, gestureish, ample;
giving the sense that in nothing less commodious than a church could
he loose his person and his powers to their full expression. He was
genially familiar; the church-man who is a good fellow. Yet never did
he let one forget the respect that was due his cloth.

He was at present without a charge, as she learned later. It was
understood that he was waiting an almost certain call from a church in
Kansas City.

As Mrs. De Peyster came out of her room that first Sunday at
supper-time, there emerged from the room in front of hers the Reverend
Mr. Pyecroft. He held out his hand, and smiled parochially.

"Ah, Miss Thompson,"--that was the name she had given the
landlady,--"since we are neighbors we should also be friends." And on
he went, voluminously, in his full, upholstered voice.

Somehow Mrs. De Peyster got away from him. But thereafter he spoke to
her whenever he could waylay her in the hallway or upon the stairs.
And his attentions did not stop with words. Flowers, even edibles,
were continuously found against her door, his card among them. The
situation somehow recalled to her the queer gentleman in shorts who
threw vegetables over Mrs. Nickleby's garden wall. Mrs. De Peyster
felt outraged; she fumed; yet she dared not be outspokenly resentful.

She had at first no inkling of the meaning of these attentions. It was
Matilda who suggested the dismaying possibility.

"Don't you think, ma'am, he's trying to make love to you?"

"Make love to me!" rising in horror from one of Mrs. Gilbert's veteran
"easy"-chairs.

"I'm sure it's that, ma'am," said the troubled Matilda.

"Matilda! Of all the effrontery!"

"Indeed, it is an insult to you, ma'am. But that may not be the worst
of it. For if he really falls in love with you, he may try to follow
you when you get ready to leave."

"Matilda!" gasped Mrs. De Peyster.

Thereafter, whenever he tried to spe