"I'd like to see it," she rejoined. "Well, it couldn't improve you!--remember always that the fewer fine clothes you have on the better. Tell me, Blossom," he added, touching her shoulder, "have you many lovers?" She shook her head. "There are so few about here that any woman would look at." "I've been told that there's an engaging young rector." "Mr. Mullen--well, so he is--and he preaches the most beautiful sermons. But he fancies Molly Merryweather, they say, like all the others, though he won't be likely to marry anybody from around here, I suppose." Her drawling Southern tongue lent a charm, he felt, to her naive disclosures. "Like all the others?" he repeated smiling. "Do you mean to tell me that Reuben's piquant little granddaughter is a greater belle in the neighbourhood than you are?" "She has a way with them," said Blossom sweetly. "I don't know what it is and I am sure she is a good, kind girl--but I sometimes think men like her because she is so contrary. My Uncle Abel has almost lost his head about her, yet she plays fast and loose with him in the cruelest fashion." "Oh, well, she'll burn her fingers some day, at her own fire, and then she'll be sorry." "I don't want her to be sorry, but I do wish she'd try just a little to be kind--one day she promises to marry Abel and the next you'd think she'd taken a liking to Jim Halloween." "Perhaps she has a secret sentiment for the rector?" he suggested, to pique her. "But I don't believe he will marry anybody around here," she insisted, while the colour flooded her face. The discovery that she had once cherished--that she still cherished, perhaps, a regard for the young clergyman, added a zest to the adventure, while it freed his passion from the single restraint of which he had been aware. It was not in his nature to encourage a chivalrous desire to protect a woman who had betrayed, however innocently, a sentiment for another man. When the Reverend Mr. Mullen inadvertently introduced an emotional triangle, he had changed the situation from one of mere sentimental dalliance into direct pursuit. By some law of reflex action, known only to the male mind at such instants, the first sign that she was not to be won threw him into the mental attitude of the chase. "Are the fascinations of your Mr. Mullen confined to the pulpit?" he inquired after a moment, "or does he wear them for the benefit of the heterodox when he walks abroad?" "Oh, he's not my Mr. Mullen, sir," she hastened to explain though her words trailed off into a sound that was suspiciously like a sigh. "Molly Merryweather's Mr. Mullen, then?" "I don't think he cares for Molly--not in that way." "Are you quite as sure that Molly doesn't care for him in that way?"