“So it’s all done, is it?  No chance for Sam?” Offitt asked eagerly.

“Not as much as you could hold sawdust in your eye,” the carpenter answered.

“Well, now, Mr. Matchin, I have got something to say.” ("Oh, Lordy,” groaned Saul to himself, “here’s another one.”) “I wouldn’t take no advantage of a friend; but if Sam’s got no chance, as you say, why shouldn’t I try?  With your permission, sir, I will.”

“Now look ye here, Mr. Offitt.  I don’t know as I have got anything against you, but I don’t know nothing fur you.  If it’s a fair question, how do you make your livin’?”

“That’s all right.  First place, I have got a good trade.  I’m a locksmith.”

“So I have heard you say.  But you don’t work at it.”

“No,” Offitt answered; and then, assuming a confidential air, he continued, “As I am to be one of the family, I’ll tell you.  I don’t work at my trade, because I have got a better thing.  I am a Reformer.”

“You don’t say!” exclaimed Saul.  “I never heard o’ your lecturin’.”

“I don’t lecture.  I am secretary of a grand section of Labor Reformers, and I git a good salary for it.”

“Oh, I see,” said Saul, not having the least idea of what it all meant.  But, like most fathers of his kind, he made no objection to the man’s proposal, and told him his daughter was in the house.  As Offitt walked away on the same quest where Bott had so recently come to wreck, Saul sat smiling, and nursing his senile vanity with the thought that there were not many mechanics’ daughters in Buffland that could get two offers in one Sunday from “professional men.”  He sat with the contented inertness of old men on his well-worn bench, waiting to see what would be the result of the interview.

“I don’t believe she’ll have him,” he thought.  “He ain’t half the man that Sam is, nor half the scholar that Bott is.”

It was well he was not of an impatient temperament.  He sat quietly there for more than an hour, as still as a knot on a branch, wondering why it took Offitt so much longer than Bott to get an answer to a plain question; but it never once occurred to him that he had a right to go into his own house and participate in what conversation was going on.  To American fathers of his class, the parlor is sacred when the daughter has company.

There were several reasons why Offitt stayed longer than Bott.

The seer had left Maud Matchin in a state of high excitement and anger.  The admiration of a man so splay and ungainly was in itself insulting, when it became so enterprising as to propose marriage.  She felt as if she had suffered the physical contact of something not clean or wholesome.  Besides, she had been greatly stirred by his reference to her request for ghostly counsel, which had resulted in so frightful a failure and mortification.  After Bott had gone, she could not dismiss the subject from her mind.  She said to herself, “How can I live, hating a man as I hate that Captain Farnham?  How can I breathe the same air with him, blushing like a peony whenever I think of him, and turning pale with shame when I hear his name?  That ever I should have been refused by a living man!  What does a man want,” she asked, with her head thrown back and her nostrils dilated, “when he don’t want me?”