“I think,” said Wesley Elliot soberly, “that I ought to resign.” Then the girl paled, and bent closer over her work. “Resign!” she gasped. “Yes, resign. I admit I haven’t enough money to live without a salary, though I would like to stay here forever.” Wesley spoke with fervor, his eyes on the girl. “Oh, no, you wouldn’t.” “I most certainly would, but I can’t run in debt, and—I want to marry some day—like other young men—and I must earn.” The girl bent her head lower. “Why don’t you resign and go away, and get—married, if you want to?” “Fanny!” He bent over her. His lips touched her hair. “You know,” he began—then came a voice like the legendary sword which divides lovers for their best temporal and spiritual good. “Dinner is ready and the peas are getting cold,” said Mrs. Solomon Black. Then it happened that Wesley Elliot, although a man and a clergyman, followed like a little boy the large woman with the water-waves through the weedage of the pastoral garden, and the girl sat weeping awhile from mixed emotions of anger and grief. Then she took a little puff from her bag, powdered her nose, straightened her hair and, also, went home, bag in hand, to her own noon dinner. Chapter II. A church fair is one of the purely feminine functions which will be the last to disappear when the balance between the sexes is more evenly adjusted. It is almost a pity to assume that it will finally, in the nature of things, disappear, for it is charming; it is innocent with the innocence of very good, simple women; it is at the same time subtle with that inimitable subtlety which only such women can achieve. It is petty finance on such a moral height that even the sufferers by its code must look up to it. Before even woman, showing anything except a timid face of discovery at the sights of New York under male escort, invaded Wall Street, the church fair was in full tide, and the managers thereof might have put financiers to shame by the cunning, if not magnitude, of their operations. Good Christian women, mothers of families, would sell a tidy of no use except to wear to a frayed edge the masculine nerves, and hand-painted plates of such bad art that it verged on immorality, for prices so above all reason, that a broker would have been taken aback. And it was all for worthy objects, these pretty functions graced by girls and matrons in their best attire, with the products of their little hands offered, or even forced, upon the outsider who was held up for the ticket. They gambled shamelessly to buy a new carpet for the church. There was plain and brazen raffling for dreadful lamps and patent rockers and dolls which did not look fit to be owned by nice little girl-mothers, and all for the church organ, the minister’s salary and such like. Of this description was the church fair held in Brookville to raise money to pay the Reverend Wesley Elliot. He came early, and haunted the place like a morbid spirit. He