“Ef I think ’em, why shouldn’t I say ’em?  I don’t know no law agin tellin’ the truth ef you git into a place where you can’t no ways help it.  I don’t call you angel, fer you a’n’t; you ha’nt got no wings nor feathers.  I don’t say as how as you’re pertikeler knock-down handsome.  I don’t pertend that you’re a spring chicken.  I don’t lie nor flatter.  I a’n’t goin’ it blind, like young men in love.  But I do say, with my eyes open and in my right senses, and feelin’ solemn, like a man a-makin’ his last will and testament, that they a’n’t no sech another woman to be found outside the leds of the Bible betwixt the Bay of Fundy and the Rio Grande.  I’ve ‘sought round this burdened airth,’ as the hymn says, and they a’n’t but jest one.  Ef that one’ll jest make me happy, I’ll fold my weary pinions and settle down in a rustic log-cabin and raise corn and potaters till death do us part.”

Cynthy trembled.  Cynthy was a saint, a martyr to religious feeling, a medieval nun in her ascetic eschewing of the pleasures of life.  But Cynthy Ann was also a woman.  And a woman whose spring-time had paused.  When love buds out thus late, when the opportunity for the woman’s nature to blossom comes unexpectedly upon one at her age, the temptation is not easily resisted.  Cynthy trembled, but did not quite yield up her Christian constancy.

“Jonas, I don’t know whether I’d orto or not.  I don’t deny—­I think I’d better ax brother Goshorn, you know, sence what would it profit ef I gained you or any joy in this world, and then come short by settin’ you up fer a idol in my heart?  I don’t know whether a New Light is a onbeliever or not, and whether I’d be onequally yoked or not.  I must ax them as knows better nor I do.”

“Well, ef I’m a onbeliever, they’s nobody as could teach me to believe quicker’n you could.  I never did believe much in women folks till I believed in you.”

“But that’s the sin of it, Jonas.  I’d believe in you, and you’d believe in me, and we’d be puttin’ our trust in the creatur instid of the Creator, and the Creator is mighty jealous of our idols, and He would take us away fer idolatry.”

“No, but I wouldn’t worship you, though I’d rather worship you than anybody else ef I was goin’ into the worshipin’ business.  But you see I a’n’t, honey.  I wouldn’t sacrifice to you no lambs nor sheep, I wouldn’t pray to you, nor I wouldn’t kiss your shoes, like people does the Pope’s.  An’ I know you wouldn’t make no idol of me like them Greek gods that Andrew’s got picters of.  I a’n’t handsome enough by a long shot fer a Jupiter or a ‘Pollo.  An’ I tell you, Cynthy, ’tain’t no sin to love.  Love is the fullfilling of the law.”

But Cynthy Ann persisted that she must consult Brother Goshorn, the antiquated class-leader at the cross-roads.  Brother Goshorn was a good man, but Jonas had a great contempt for him.  He was a strainer out of gnats, though I do not think he swallowed camels.  He always stood at the door of the love-feast and kept out every woman with jewelry, every girl who had an “artificial” in her bonnet, every one who wore curls, every man whose hair was beyond what he considered the regulation length of Scripture, and every woman who wore a veil.  In support of this last prohibition he quoted Isaiah iii, 23:  “The glasses and the fine linen and the hoods and the veils.”