me
instinctively draw back, he added, "These things must inconvenience you,
madam. I wish you had made your visit to the lane in happier times."

There was a smirk on his face which made him positively repellent. I
could scarcely bow my acknowledgments, his look and attitude made the
interview so obnoxious. Looking about for William, I stepped down from
the stoop. The Deacon followed me.

"Where is William?" I asked.

The Deacon ran his eye over the place, and suddenly frowned with
ill-concealed vexation.

"The scapegrace!" he murmured. "What business has he in my barn?"

I immediately forced a smile which, in days long past (I've almost
forgotten them now), used to do some execution.

"Oh, he's a boy!" I exclaimed. "Do not mind his pranks, I pray. What a
comfortable place you have here!"

Instantly a change passed over the Deacon, and he turned to me with an
air of great interest, broken now and then by an uneasy glance behind
him at the barn.

"I am glad you like the place," he insinuated, keeping close at my side
as I stepped somewhat briskly down the walk. "It is a nice place, worthy
of the commendation of so competent a judge as yourself." (It was a
barren, hard-worked farm, without one attractive feature.) "I have lived
on it now forty years, thirty-two of them with my beloved wife Caroline,
and two--" Here he stopped and wiped a tear from the dryest eye I ever
saw. "Miss Butterworth, I am a widower."

I hastened my steps. I here duly and with the strictest regard for the
truth aver, that I decidedly hastened my steps at this very unnecessary
announcement. But he, with another covert glance behind him towards the
barn, from which, to my surprise and increasing anxiety, William had not
yet emerged, kept well up to me, and only paused when I paused at the
side of the road near the buggy.

"Miss Butterworth," he began, undeterred by the air of dignity I
assumed, "I have been thinking that your visit here is a rebuke to my
unneighborliness. But the business which has occupied the lane these
last few days has put us all into such a state of unpleasantness that it
was useless to attempt sociability."

His voice was so smooth, his eyes so small and twinkling, that if I
could have thought of anything except William's possible discoveries in
the barn, I should have taken delight in measuring my wits against his
egotism.

But as it was, I said nothing, possibly because I only half heard what
he was saying.