ous
belief! And how quick she had been to appreciate the literary side at
least of his quotations from Ezekiel! What more was striking or
unusual about her he could not then take time to consider, for people
so recently complete strangers cannot, it is conceded, discuss each
other or a situation as they may after several days or weeks of
intimacy. He was conscious of feeling that in a certain sense he had
met with as clever a brain as his own and with some one in whose
personal history or life story there was an element of romance, of the
unexpected, the unconventional, absolutely foreign to his own
experience of life. He therefore hastened to change the subject.

"It may be that you have heard. If not, I may tell you that Mr.
Poussette has offered me the new church at St. Ignace. I took this
long walk out here to-day to think it over. I--well, frankly, I hardly
know what to say."

"In your profession you are not supposed to consult your own wishes,
but rather the general good. Is not that the case?"

Ringfield smiled, but also shot a look at his companion.

"I suppose I may put it that I have had a 'call'. A call to the new,
flourishing and highly attractive 'parish,' as our friends the
Anglicans call it, I should say, the 'mission,' of St. Ignace. I am
not speaking satirically, I might do worse."

"You are considering it, now, this afternoon?"

He paused for a mere fraction of a moment. "I was."

"In the meantime, you have another service this evening and I am
detaining you here when you should be on your way back to the Fall and
the village."

It was true. Ringfield was forgetting the time.

"Had it not been for the bird--" he began, and from that point the
conversation, at one time strongly personal and introspective, became
ordinary. Ringfield closed the gate behind him, lifted his hat and
turned back along the road without having ascertained the name of the
lady or her condition in life. The service hour arrived, so did the
small but enthusiastic congregation. The rain had entirely ceased and
the air was perceptibly cooler. The preacher had prepared a sermon of
more florid style than the one delivered in the morning, and he
appeared to have the absorbed attention of those who understood the
language, while the French contingent listened respectfully. The
passage of Scripture to be read aloud had been chosen since the
morning, since the afternoon walk in fact, but there was no one presen