ite suddenly to congenial
personalities.

"What was it you wished I wouldn't, Miss Sally?"

Our Sally had it on her lips to say, "Why, do _that_--call me _Miss_
Sally, of course! I can't _tell_ you how I hate it." But, this time,
she was seized with a sudden fit of shyness. She could have said it
quite easily before that trivial hand-occurrence, and the momentary
stiffness that followed it. Now she backed out in the meanest way, and
even sought to fortify the lady and gentleman pretext. She looked back
over the panorama they were leaving behind, and discerned that that
was Jeremiah and her maternal parent coming through the clover-field.
But it wasn't, palpably. Nevertheless, Sally held tight to her
groundless opinion long enough for the previous question to be
droppable, without effrontery. Then her incorrigible candour bubbled
up, and she refused to take advantage of her own subterfuge.

"Never mind, Dr. Conrad; I'll tell you presently. I've a bone to pick
with you. Wait till we've seen the little churchy-wurchy--there it
is, over there, with a big weathercock--and then we can quarrel and
go home separate."

Even Agur, the son of Jakeh, would have seen, at this point, the way
that this particular maid, in addressing this particular man, was
exaggerating a certain spirit of bravado; and if he had been
accompanying them unseen from St. Sennans, would certainly have
deserved his own self-censure if he had failed to trace this spirit
to its source--the hand-incident. We believe it was only affectation
in Agur, and that he knew all about the subject, men, maids, and
every other sort; only he didn't think any of the female sorts worth
his Oriental consideration. It was a far cry to the dawn of Browning
in those days.

Down the hill to the flatlands was a steep pathway, where talk paused
naturally. When you travel in single file on a narrow footway with
a grass slide to right or left of you, which it does not do to tread
on with shoe-soles well polished on two miles of previous grass, you
don't talk--especially if you have come to some point in talk where
silence is not unwelcome. Sally and the doctor said scarcely a dozen
words on the way down to the little village that owned the name and
the church of Chalke. When they arrived in its seclusion they found,
for purposes of information and reference, no human creatures visible
except some absolutely brown, white-haired ones whose existence dated
back only a very few ye