"Oh! tell him I sent you--Ben Wilkes--and you are all right." "Thank you!" Mary and Dick replied and turned away. "Ben Wilkes," who, during this conversation, had seated himself on the counter, the better to show his ease in the strangers' society, which--Mary's especially--secretly impressed him very much, looked leisurely after them as they passed out of the store; then took out some fresh tobacco, and returned to his chair. "I don't like to go," said Mary, "it may be some joke upon us." "I am afraid it is," answered Dick; "but, after all, what can happen that we need mind? If it is a gentleman to whom he has sent us, no matter how angry he is, he will see that you are a lady, and you will know how to explain it; if he has sent us to one who is not, I guess I shall be able to reply to him." Their walk was a very long one, but the meeting-house at last came in sight, and next it, though there was a goodly space between, was a large white house, irregular and rambling, with very nicely kept shrubbery around. Dick opened the gate with a hand that was a little nervous; but Mary whispered as their feet crunched the neatly bordered gravel walk to the low porch, "It is all right, I am sure; there is an old gentleman by the window." "Will you be spokesman this time?" asked Dick. Mary nodded, and as the path was narrow and they could not well walk side by side, she was in front, so that naturally she would be the first to meet the old gentleman. A very fine old gentleman he was; a large man with a fine head, and, as his first words proved, a remarkably full, sweet voice. Seeing a lady coming toward him, he rose at once from his arm-chair, closed his book and advanced a step or two to greet her. Mary was one of those women toward whom courteous men are most courteous from the first glance; and this old gentleman, who moved toward her with all the grace and ease of a vigorous young man, was one of those men to whom gentle women are gentler, from the first, than to others. "Good-evening," he said, as Mary looked up to him with a smile at at once pleasant and deferential. "Good-evening," and as she did not say more than these words, the gentleman continued, "I will not say, 'Come in,' for it is too pleasant out of doors for that; but let me give you chairs." {190} "Thank you, sir, we are strangers, but, we hope, not intruders," she replied.