“And perhaps you know, Miss Cynthia, that people talk about some of the girls he has been with.” “I know,” said the girl, looking at him with an absent glance. “There is no use going over that. I hear nothing all day long at home except that—that—that! Oh, sometimes I wish I were dead!” “Ah, that hurts worse than anything you have ever said!” declared the minister in a tone of pain as he stroked his thin face with an unsteady hand. “Why should a beautiful, pure, human flower like you be made unhappy because of contact with a human weed——?” “Stop, I tell you! Stop!” The girl stared at him with flashing eyes. “I am not going to have you talk to me as if I were a child. I know him as well as you do. You preach all day long that a person ought to be forgiven of his sins, and yet you want to load some of them down with theirs—that is, when it suits you. He has as good a right to—to—to reform as anyone, and I, myself, have heard you say that the vilest sin often purifies and lifts one up. Don’t get warped all to one side. I shall not respect your views any more if you do.” Hillhouse was white in the face and trembling helplessly. “You are tying me hand and foot,” he said, with a groan. “If I ever had a chance to gain my desires, I am killing them, but God knows I can’t help it. I am fighting for my life.” “And behind another’s back,” added the girl firmly. “You’ve got to be fair to him! As for myself, I don’t believe half the things that the busybodies have said about him. Let me tell you something.” They had come to a little brook which they had to cross on brown, almost submerged stepping-stones, and she paused, laying her small hand on his arm, and said portentously: “Nelson Floyd has been alone with me several times and has never yet told me that he loved me.” “I’m not going to say what is in my mind,” Hillhouse said, with a cold, significant sneer on his white lip, as he took her hand and helped her across the stream. “You say you won’t?” Cynthia gave him her eyes wonderingly, almost pleadingly. “That is, not unless you will let me be plain with you,” Hillhouse answered; “as plain as I’d be to my sister.” They walked on side by side in silence, now very near her father’s house. “You may as well finish what you were going to say,” the girl gave in, with a sigh of resignation tinged with a curiosity that devoured her precaution. “Well, I was going to say that, if what I have gathered here and there is true, it is Nelson Floyd’s favorite method to _look_, do you understand?—to _look_ love to the girls he goes with. He has never, it seems, committed himself by a scratch of a pen or by word of mouth, and yet every silly woman he has paid attention to, before he began to go with you, has secretly sworn to herself that she was the world and all to him.” Cynthia’s face became grave. Her glance went down and for a moment she seemed incapable of speech. Finally, however, her color rose and she laughed defiantly.