d a year--almost a
minister's salary! Little people guessed that there was no
love-making--only endless discussions of books beside the great centre
chimney, and discussions of Isaac Worthington's career.

It is a fact--for future consideration--that Isaac Worthington proposed
to Cynthia Ware, although neither Speedy Bates nor Deacon Ira Perkins
heard him do so. It had been very carefully prepared, that speech, and
was a model of proposals for the rising young men of all time. Mr.
Worthington preferred to offer himself for what he was going to be--not
for what he was. He tendered to Cynthia a note for a large amount,
payable in some twenty years, with interest. The astonishing thing to
record is that in twenty years he could have more than paid the note,
although he could not have foreseen at that time the Worthington Free
Library and the Truro Railroad, and the stained-glass window in the
church and the great marble monument on the hill--to another woman. All
of these things, and more, Cynthia might have had if she had only
accepted that promise to pay! But she did not accept it. He was a trifle
more robust than when he came to Brampton in the summer, but perhaps she
doubted his promise to pay.

It may have been guessed, although the language we have used has been
purposely delicate, that Cynthia was already in love with--somebody else.
Shame of shames and horror of horrors--with Jethro Bass! With Strength,
in the crudest form in which it is created, perhaps, but yet with
Strength. The strength might gradually and eventually be refined. Such
was her hope, when she had any. It is hard, looking back upon that
virginal and cultured Cynthia, to be convinced that she could have loved
passionately, and such a man! But love she did, and passionately, too,
and hated herself for it, and prayed and struggled to cast out what she
believed, at times, to be a devil.

The ancient allegory of Cupid and the arrows has never been improved
upon: of Cupid, who should never in the world have been trusted with a
weapon, who defies all game laws, who shoots people in the bushes and
innocent bystanders generally, the weak and the helpless and the strong
and self-confident! There is no more reason in it than that. He shot
Cynthia Ware, and what she suffered in secret Coniston never guessed.
What parallels in history shall I quote to bring home the enormity of
such a mesalliance? Orthodox Coniston would have gone into sackcloth and
ashes,--