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“I hope you won’t get hardened in unbelief, Lloyd,” she said soberly.

The congregation was drifting toward the church again, and the young people turned. Lloyd touched the iridescent silk of her wide sleeve.

“You ain’t a-going to let this make any difference between you and me, are you, Marg’et Ann?” he pleaded.

“I don’t know,” wavered the girl. “I hope you’ll be brought to a sense of your true condition, Lloyd.” She hesitated, smoothing the sheen of her skirt. “It would be an awful cross to father and mother.”

The young man fell behind her in the narrow path, and they walked to the church door in unhappy silence.

Inside, the elders had accomplished the spreading of the tables with slow-moving, awkward reverence. The spotless drapery swayed a little in the afternoon breeze, and there was a faint fruity smell of communion wine in the room.

The two ministers and some of the older communicants sat with bowed heads, in deep spiritual isolation.

The solemn stillness of self-examination pervaded the room, and Marg’et Ann went to her seat with a vague stirring of resentment in her heart toward the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who, with all his learning, could not convince this one lost sheep of the error of his theological way. She put aside such thoughts, however, before the serving of the tables, and walked humbly down the aisle behind her mother, singing the one hundred and sixteenth psalm to the quaint rising and falling cadences of “Dundee.”

Once, while the visiting pastor addressed the communicants, she thought how it would simplify matters if Lloyd were sitting opposite her, and then caught her breath as the minister adjured each one to examine himself, lest eating and drinking unworthily he should eat and drink damnation to himself.

It was almost sunset when the service ended, and as the Morrisons drove into the lane the smell of jimson-weed was heavy on the evening air, and they could hear the clank of the cow bells in the distance.

Marg’et Ann went to her room to lay aside her best dress and get ready for the milking, and Mrs. Morrison and Rebecca made haste to see about supper.

Miss Nancy McClanahan walked about the garden in her much made-over black silk, and compared the progress of Mrs. Morrison’s touch-me-nots and four-o’clocks with her own, nipping herself a sprig of tansy from the patch under the Bowerly apple-tree.

She shared Marg’et Ann’s room that night, and after she had taken off her lace headdress and put a frilled nightcap over her lonesome little knot of gray hair and said her prayers, she composed herself on her pillow with a patient sigh, and lay watching Marg’et Ann crowd her burnished braids into her close-fitting cap without speaking; but after the light was out, and her companion had lain down beside her, the old maid placed her knotted hand on the girl’s more shapely one, and said:–

“There’s worse things than living single, Marg’et Ann, and then again I suppose there’s better. Of course every girl has her chances, and the people we make sacrifices for don’t always seem quite as grateful as we calculated they’d be. I’m not repinin’, but I sometimes think if I had my life to live over again I’d do different.”

Marg’et Ann pressed the knotted fingers, that felt like a handful of hickory nuts, and touched the little circle with its two worn-out hearts, but she said nothing.

She had heard that the Rev. Samuel McClanahan was going to marry the youngest Groesbeck girl, now that his children were “getting well up out of the way,” and she knew that her mother had been telling Miss Nancy something about her own love affair with Lloyd Archer.

Whatever Mrs. Morrison may have confided to Miss Nancy McClanahan concerning Marg’et Ann and her lover must have been entirely suppositional and therefore liable to error; for the confidence between parent and child did not extend into the mysteries of love and marriage, nor would the older woman have dreamed of intruding upon the sacred precinct of her daughter’s feelings toward a young man. She had remarked once or twice to her husband that she was afraid sometimes that there was something between Lloyd Archer and Marg’et Ann; but whether this something was a barrier or a bond she left the worthy minister to divine.