“When de preacher took his text
  He looked so berry much perplext,
Fer nothin’ come acrost his mine
  But Dandy Jim from Caroline!

“Yah! yah!  Plague take it!  Come, Kate, stick on a sun-bonnet or a hat, and let’s walk.  It’s too nice a night to stay in the house, by George!  You’ll excuse, Mr. Charlton?  All right; come on, Kate.”

And Katy hesitated, and said in a deprecating tone:  “You won’t mind, will you, Brother Albert?”

And Albert said no, that he wouldn’t mind, with a calmness that astonished himself; for he was aching to fall foul of Katy’s lover, and beat the coxcombry out of him, or kill him.

“By-by!” said Westcott to Albert, as he went out, and young Charlton went out another door, and strode off toward Diamond Lake.  On the high knoll overlooking the lake he stopped and looked away to the east, where the darkness was slowly gathering over the prairie.  Night never looks so strange as when it creeps over a prairie, seeming to rise, like a shadowy Old Man of the Sea, out of the grass.  The images become more and more confused, and the landscape vanishes by degrees.  Away to the west Charlton saw the groves that grew on the banks of the Big Gun River, and then the smooth prairie knolls beyond, and in the dim horizon the “Big Woods.”  Despite ail his anxiety, Charlton could not help feeling the influence of such a landscape.  The greatness, the majesty of God, came to him for a moment.  Then the thought of Kate’s unhappy love came over him more bitterly from the contrast with the feelings excited by the landscape.  He went rapidly over the possible remedies.  To remonstrate with Katy seemed out of the question.  If she had any power of reason, he might argue.  Bat one can not reason with feeling.  It was so hard that a soul so sweet, so free from the all but universal human taint of egoism, a soul so loving, self-sacrificing, and self-consecrating, should throw itself away.

“O God!” he cried, between praying and swearing, “must this alabaster-box of precious ointment be broken upon the head of an infernal coxcomb?”

And then, as he remembered how many alabaster-boxes of precious womanly love were thus wasted, and as he looked abroad at the night settling down so inevitably on trees and grass and placid lake, it seemed to him that there could be no Benevolent Intelligence in the universe.  Things rolled on as they would, and all his praying would no more drive away the threatened darkness from Kate’s life than any cry of his would avail to drive back the all-pervading, awesome presence of night, which was putting out the features of the landscape one after another.

Albert thought to go to his mother.  But then with bitterness he confessed to himself, for the first time, that his mother was less wise than Katy herself.  He almost called her a fool.  And he at once rejected the thought of appealing to his step-father.  He felt, also, that this was an emergency in which all his own knowledge and intelligence were of no account.  In a matter of affection, a conceited coxcomb, full of flattering speeches, was too strong for him.