The small, compact box, neatly wrapped in paper, was transferred from Ben's crowded arms to Elsie's empty ones. Then the walk commenced. A bright sunny day, the air just keen enough to be exhilarating, and the business street down which their road lay was aglow with holiday trappings. A walk was certainly not an unattractive thing. Yet there was a cloud on Elsie's face; and if her gay cousin had been watching her, he would have discovered that she bestowed suspicious glances on the innocent-looking box which she carried. It was not its weight that disturbed her; that was a mere trifle. What then? She watched her opportunity, when Ben was busy re-arranging his load, and unceremoniously applied her nose to the box. Faugh! It was as she suspected. Here was she, Elsie Burton, who hated the sight and smell and very name of the vile weed tobacco, actually carrying a box of cigars through the street! She could have dropped them into the muddy carriage drive, across which they were just picking their way, with a good grace. "I wonder if Ben smokes!" This was her indignant mental query. "I declare, if that boy has gone and spoiled himself in such a hateful way, I shall drop him." There were certain phases of moral courage in which Elsie was by no means lacking. She was entirely willing to express then and there, to her handsome young cousin, her utter and intense abhorrence of everything pertaining to tobacco; and the probabilities are strong that her very manner of doing so would have outwitted any good which she desired to accomplish; that is, if she really wished to accomplish anything beyond expressing her indignation. Something quieted her just then. The memory of certain words: "Can you let it take up things which, to say the very least, are not 'for Jesus'?" Suppose people really did govern their lives by such rules as that? Suppose Ben did. Would he be carrying home cigars to smoke? What a thing it was that he had been the one to lead her unwittingly into this first soiling of her hands! Almost before she realized that she was doing so, she spoke her thoughts aloud: "Oh, Ben! You have made me soil my hands." Her cousin turned to her quickly, his face expressive of concern. "I beg ten thousand pardons! Was I such a stupid dolt as to give you a soiled paper to carry? What is it? Are your gloves ruined?" But he looked in vain for soil; the delicate bronze gloves were as delicate as before she touched the box, and the neat manilla wrapping was guiltless of a stain. Elsie laughed a little. "I was thinking aloud," she said. "I did not mean my gloves, but my hands. Ben, I don't like the soil of cigars." "Are they so very offensive to you?" This with a puzzled air. "It isn't possible that you get their odor at this distance!" "O, Ben! You know you are not stupid. Why do you pretend that you don't understand me to mean moral soil?"