"Well, I am sure that I do not know what I can do." "Do you want me to tell you?" "If it will relieve your feelings," Nelson drawled insolently. "Then get out of this place and stay out. If you return again for any purpose whatever I am afraid it is I who will have to eject you. We will not argue the matter again." "Well, I regret this unfortunate encounter, and to have been forced to listen to the unguarded vituperation of my rector." With which retort he departed. Soon after Nelson had left, Mrs. Burke called in, and Betty gave her a highly amusing and somewhat colored version of the interview. "You know, I think that our theological seminaries don't teach budding parsons all they ought to, by any means," she concluded. "I quite agree with you, Betty dear; and I thank my stars for college athletics," laughed Maxwell, squaring up to the tent-pole. "What did I tell you," reminded Hepsey, "when you had all those books up in your room at my place. It's just as important for a country parson to know how to make a wiped-joint or run a chicken farm or pull teeth, as it is to study church history and theology. A parson's got to live somehow, and a trade school ought to be attached to every seminary, according to my way of thinking! St. Paul made tents, and wasn't a bit ashamed of it. Well I'm mighty glad that Bascom has got come up with for once. Don't you give in, and it will be my turn to make the next move, if this don't bring him to his senses. You just wait and see." [Illustration] CHAPTER XIX COULEUR de ROSE Hepsey had been so busy with helping the Maxwells that for some time no opportunity had occurred for Jonathan to press his ardent suit. Since his first attempt and its abrupt termination, he had been somewhat bewildered; he had failed to decide whether he was an engaged man open to congratulations, or a rejected suitor to be condoled with. He tried to recall exactly what she had said. As near as he could recollect, it was: "I'll think it over, and perhaps some day--" Then he had committed the indiscretion of grasping her hand, causing her to drop her stitches before she had ended what she was going to say. He could have sworn at himself to think that it was all his fault that she had stopped just at the critical moment, when she might have committed herself and given him some real encouragement. But he consoled himself by the thought that she had evidently taken him seriously at last; and so to the "perhaps some day" he added, in imagination, the words "I will take you"; and this seemed reasonable.