e. You can see it for yourself."

Mr. Ware did not offer to look. "Very likely these are for the garden I
was speaking of," he said. "Of course you can't go on taking plants out
of a garden indefinitely without putting others in."

"I don't know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of,"
answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon
the street below. Then he turned to the minister. "Your wife's doing a
good deal of gardening this spring, I notice," he said casually. "You'd
hardly think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants
any extra hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons."

"I will remember," said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and
nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself
came in.

The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering the
identity of his visitor, with whom he shook hands in almost an excess of
cordiality. He spread a large newspaper over the pile of seedling plants
on the table, pushed the packing-box under the table with his foot, and
said almost peremptorily to the boy, "You can go now!" Then he turned
again to Theron.

"Well, Mr. Ware, I'm glad to see you," he repeated, and drew up a chair
by the window. "Things are going all right with you, I hope."

Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin, and the
carefully trimmed mustache and chin-tuft which gave the lawyer's face
a combined effect of romance and smartness. No; it was the eyes,
cool, shrewd, dark-gray eyes, which suggested this latter quality. The
recollection of having seen one of them wink, in deliberate hostility
of sarcasm, when those other trustees had their backs turned, came
mercifully at the moment to recall the young minister to his errand.

"I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you," he said, getting
better under way as he went on. "Quarterly Conference is only a
fortnight off, and I am a good deal at sea about what is going to
happen."

"I'm not a church member, you know," interposed Gorringe. "That shuts me
out of the Quarterly Conference."

"Alas, yes!" said Theron. "I wish it didn't. I'm afraid I'm not going to
have any friends to spare there."

"What are you afraid of?" asked the lawyer, seeming now to be wholly at
his ease again "They can't eat you."

"No, they keep me too lean for that," responded Theron, with a pensive
smile. "I WAS going to ask, you know, for an increase o