And since none of the ladies, for one reason or another, had found a way to say those things that Mrs. Lansdale sorely needed to hear, it was agreed among them that the minister must say them.

“The minister” in Little Arcady meant him of the Methodist church, the two other clergymen being so young and unimportant as to need identification by name.

Of the official and inspired visit of this good man to Miss Caroline, the version that reached the public was one thing:  its secret and true history was another.  The latter has never been told until now.  It was known abroad only that the minister had called on a warm afternoon in July; that Miss Caroline had received him out of doors, on the shaded east side of the house, where the heat had driven her to await a cooling breeze from the river.  One of the dingy rugs had been spread upon the grass close to the lilac clump, and by an unfashionable little table Miss Caroline sat, in a chair sadly out of date, reading of Childe Harold.  It was understood that the minister had there sat in another antiquated chair of capacious arms and upholstered in faded green velvet, a chair brought by Clem; and that he had weakly chatted away a pleasant hour or two without ever once daring to bring Miss Caroline’s evil state to that attention which it merited from her.  His difficulty seemed to have been similar to that experienced by the calling ladies.  He could observe no opening that promised anything but an ungracious plunge or an awkward stumble, and the ladies had been wrong in suspecting that his authority as a cleric would nerve him to either of these things.

There was despair next day when it was known that he had come away even lavisher in praise of Miss Caroline than Aunt Delia had become; that he refused with a gentle but unbreakable stubbornness, a thing he was known to be cursed with latently, ever again to approach the lady with a concealed purpose or with aught in his heart but a warm and flagrant esteem.

So much for the public’s knowledge; and doubtless the public in every case knows all that it ought to know.  But these are the facts as they came to my privileged ears, and to what, I believe, are gifts of interpretation not below the average.

When Clem brought the chair for the minister, Miss Caroline gave him a brief, low-toned order, which he hurried away to execute.  Within ten minutes, and before Miss Caroline had finished telling how altogether beautiful she found Arcady of the Little Country, Clem returned, bearing breast-high a napkin-covered tray, from which towered twin pillars of glass, topped with fragrant leafage and pierced each by a yellow straw.  This tray he placed upon the table beside the poems of Lord Byron, and the minister permitted himself an oblique look thereat, even though this involved deserting the eyes of his agreeable hostess.  The ice in the glasses tinkled a brief phrase of music, the tops burgeoned with a luxuriant summer green, and the straws were of a sweetly pastoral suggestiveness.  The fragrance moved one to the heart of some spice-scented dell where a brooklet purled down a pebbled course.  The ensemble was indeed overwhelming in its message of a refreshment joyous, satisfying, timely, and of a consummate innocence.