The delay was short; Orlando silenced her at last by a gentle admonitory pressure of her elbow, and the two ladies drove off in their carriage, while Molly walked sedately out of the churchyard between the clergyman and his mother.  The girl was pleasantly aware that the eyes of the miller and of Jim Halloween followed her disapprovingly as she went; and she thought with complacency that she had never looked better than she did in her white felt hat with its upturned brim held back by cherry-coloured ribbon.  It was all very well for the rector to say that beauty was of less importance than visiting the sick, but the fact remained that Judy Hatch visited the sick more zealously than she—­and yet he was very far, indeed, from falling in love with Judy Hatch!  The contradiction between man and his ideal of himself was embodied before her under a clerical waistcoat.

“I believe,” remarked the Reverend Orlando, thrusting his short chin as far as possible over his collar, which buttoned at the back, “I believe that the elder Doolittle nourishes some private grudge against me.  He has a most annoying habit of shaking his head at me during the sermon as though he disagreed with my remarks.”

“The man must be an infidel,” observed Mrs. Mullen, with asperity, as she moved on in front of him.

“He doesn’t know half the time what he is doing,” said Molly, “you know he passed his ninetieth birthday last summer.”

“But surely you cannot mean that you consider age an excuse for either incivility or irreligion,” rejoined her lover, pushing aside an impertinent carrot flower that had shed its pollen on his long coat, while he regarded his mother’s back with the expression of indignant suspicion he unconsciously assumed on the rare occasions when his opinions were disputed.  “Age should mellow, should soften, should sweeten.”

“I suppose it should, but very often it doesn’t,” retorted Molly, a trifle tartly, for the sermon had bored her and she looked forward with dread to the dinner.

At her words Mrs. Mullen, who was walking a little ahead, with her skirts held up to avoid the yellow stain of the golden-rod, glanced sharply back, as she had done in church when old Adam had coughed at the wrong time and spoiled the full effect of a period.

“One reason that Orlando is so helpful to people is that he always sees so clearly just what they ought to be,” she observed.  “I don’t believe there’s a man in the ministry or out, who has a higher ideal of woman and her duty.”

“But do women ever live up to his ideal of them?”

“It isn’t his fault if they don’t.  All he can do is to point it out to them earnestly and without ceasing.”

They had reached the rectory gate, where she hesitated an instant with her hand on the latch, and her head bent toward the house in a surprised and listening attitude.  “I declare, Orlando, if I didn’t go off and leave that cat locked up in the parlour!” she exclaimed in horror as she hurried away.