“Oh, no, sir; but I do like to watch him in the pulpit.  He gesticulates so beautifully.”

“And now—­speak truth and spare not—­how do I compare with him?”

“Oh, Mr. Jonathan, you are so different!”

“Do you imply that I am ugly, Blossom?”

“Why, no—­not ugly.  Indeed I didn’t mean that.”

“But I’m not so handsome as Reverend Orlando?—­now, confess it.”

She blushed, and he thought her confusion the most charming he had ever seen.

“Well, perhaps you aren’t quite so—­so handsome; but there’s something about you, sir,” she added eagerly, “that reminds me of him.”

“By Jove!  You don’t mean it!”

“I can’t tell just what it is, but it is something.  You both look as though you’d lived in a city and had learned to wear your Sunday clothes without remembering that they are your Sunday clothes.  Of course, your hair doesn’t curl like his,” she added honestly, “and I doubt if you’d look nearly so well in the pulpit.”

“I’m very sure I shouldn’t, but Blossom—–­”

“What, Mr. Jonathan?”

“Do you think you will ever like me as well as you like Mr. Mullen?”

His gay and intimate smile awaited her answer, and in the pause, he stretched out his hand and laid it on her large round arm a little above the elbow.  The flush deepened in her face, and he felt a slight trembling under his fingers like the breast of a frightened bird.

“Blossom,” he repeated, half mocking, half tender, “do you think you will ever like me better than you like Mr. Mullen?”

At this her rustic pride came suddenly between them, and withdrawing her arm from his clasp, she stepped out of the bridle path into the wet orchard grass that surrounded them.

“I’ve known him so much longer,” she replied.

“And if you know me longer will you like me better, Blossom?”

Then as she still drew back, he pressed nearer, and spoke her name again in a whisper.

“Blossom—­Blossom, are you afraid of me?  Do you think I would hurt you?”

The gentleness in his voice stayed her flight for an instant, and in that instant, as she looked up at him, he stooped quickly and kissed her mouth.

“What a damned ass I’ve made of myself,” he thought savagely, when she broke from him and fled over the mill brook into the Revercombs’ pasture beyond.  She did not look back, but sped as straight as a frightened hare to the covert; and by this brilliant, though unconscious coquetry, she had wrested the victory from him at the moment when it had appeared to fall too easily into his hands.

“Well, it’s all right now.  I’ll take better care in the future,” he thought, his self-reproach extinguished by the assurance that, after all, he had done nothing that justified the intrusion of his conscience.  “By Jove, she’s a beauty—­but she’s not my kind all the same,” he added as he strolled leisurely homeward—­for like many persons