child whose father and mother are not
married--not properly married."

A pause followed--a long pause--and the tumbling cascade sounded louder
and louder in Ruth's ears, while Dicky considered.

"Do you think," he asked at length "that papa was not properly married
to my mother?"

"No, dear--no. And even if that were so, what difference could it make
to my loving you?"

"It wouldn't make any! Sure?"

"Sure."

"But it might make a difference to papa," he persisted, "if ever papa
had another child--like Abraham, you know--" Here he jumped to his
feet, for she had risen of a sudden. "Why, what is the matter?"

She held out a hand. There were many dragon-flies by the fall, and for
the moment he guessed that one of them had stung her.

"Dicky," she said. "Whatever happens, you and I will be friends
always."

"Always," he echoed, taking her hand and ready to search for the mark of
the sting. But her eyes were fastened on the water bubbling from the
well head.

A branch creaked aloft, and to the right of the well head the hickory
bushes rustled and parted.

"So here are the truants!" exclaimed a voice. "Good-morning, Miss
Josselin!"

Chapter II.

MR. SILK.

The Reverend Nahum Silk, B.A., sometime of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, had
first arrived in America as a missioner seeking a sphere of labour in
General Oglethorpe's new colony of Georgia. He was then (1733-4) a
young man, newly admitted to priest's orders, and undergoing what he
took to be a crisis of the soul. Sensual natures, such as his, not
uncommonly suffer in youth a combustion of religious sentiment.
The fervour is short-lived, the flame is expelled by its own blast, and
leaves a house swept and garnished, inviting devils.

For the hard fare of Georgia he soon began to seek consolations, and
early in the second year of his ministry a sufficiently gross scandal
tumbled him out of the little colony. Lacking the grit to return to
England and face out his relatives' displeasure, he had drifted
northwards to Massachusetts, and there had picked up with a slant of
luck. A number of godly and well-to-do citizens of Boston had recently
banded themselves into an association for supplying religious
opportunities to the seamen frequenting the port, and to the Committee
Mr. Silk commended himself by a hail-fellow manner and a shrewdness of
speech which, since it showed through a coat of unction, might be
supposed to mean shrewdness in g