It had been her father’s duty to have Lorraine brought up, and a maiden aunt’s duty to forego the luxury of her severe but unhampered existence to see that Lorraine was properly raised. And it was Lorraine’s duty to repay the bringing up and to take the place of the minister’s wife and be the minister’s daughter at the same time, to entertain deacons and visiting circuit riders and ladies’ aid societies alike, to clean the best room for the missionaries and cook for them and pray for the conversion of the heathen all in the same day, to be not too prominent as the minister’s daughter and yet to take the necessary lead in all things even unto making a house to house canvass to solicit her father’s back salary or enough knives and forks to serve the entire congregation at the baked bean supper! Likewise, it was her duty not to think how pretty she was—that frail, elusive sort of beauty which does not impress the first time one meets it but which, after one has become familiar with it, fairly coaxes its way into the heart to remain. (No one having merely “glimpsed” Thurley would have ever forgotten her!) Because Lorraine had innocent, dove-colored eyes and the fairest of fair hair and tilted features with dimples placed irregularly about, she was misjudged as to her abilities. No one would have dreamed that the girl painstakingly wrote the burden of her father’s letters and helped to soften his harshest of sermons, particularly those on predestination and heresy, and then turned into the kitchen to do the work of stout-elbowed women! Nor did that comprise all of her duty. To her fell those prosaic, uninteresting tasks such as taking old shoes to be mended in order to avoid buying new, or re-lining her father’s threadbare coats or rummaging endless drawers to find a recipe for walnut catsup to satisfy some bromidic but important sister of the church.