That Cynthia would accept him, nobody doubted for an instant.  It would be madness not to.  He was orthodox, so Deacon Ira had discovered, of good habits, and there was the princely four hundred a year—­almost a minister’s salary!  Little people guessed that there was no love-making—­only endless discussions of books beside the great centre chimney, and discussions of Isaac Worthington’s career.

It is a fact—­for future consideration—­that Isaac Worthington proposed to Cynthia Ware, although neither Speedy Bates nor Deacon Ira Perkins heard him do so.  It had been very carefully prepared, that speech, and was a model of proposals for the rising young men of all time.  Mr. Worthington preferred to offer himself for what he was going to be—­not for what he was.  He tendered to Cynthia a note for a large amount, payable in some twenty years, with interest.  The astonishing thing to record is that in twenty years he could have more than paid the note, although he could not have foreseen at that time the Worthington Free Library and the Truro Railroad, and the stained-glass window in the church and the great marble monument on the hill—­to another woman.  All of these things, and more, Cynthia might have had if she had only accepted that promise to pay!  But she did not accept it.  He was a trifle more robust than when he came to Brampton in the summer, but perhaps she doubted his promise to pay.

It may have been guessed, although the language we have used has been purposely delicate, that Cynthia was already in love with—­somebody else.  Shame of shames and horror of horrors—­with Jethro Bass!  With Strength, in the crudest form in which it is created, perhaps, but yet with Strength.  The strength might gradually and eventually be refined.  Such was her hope, when she had any.  It is hard, looking back upon that virginal and cultured Cynthia, to be convinced that she could have loved passionately, and such a man!  But love she did, and passionately, too, and hated herself for it, and prayed and struggled to cast out what she believed, at times, to be a devil.

The ancient allegory of Cupid and the arrows has never been improved upon:  of Cupid, who should never in the world have been trusted with a weapon, who defies all game laws, who shoots people in the bushes and innocent bystanders generally, the weak and the helpless and the strong and self-confident!  There is no more reason in it than that.  He shot Cynthia Ware, and what she suffered in secret Coniston never guessed.  What parallels in history shall I quote to bring home the enormity of such a mesalliance?  Orthodox Coniston would have gone into sackcloth and ashes,—­was soon to go into these, anyway.

I am not trying to keep the lovers apart for any mere purposes of fiction,—­this is a true chronicle, and they stayed apart most of that winter.  Jethro went about his daily tasks, which were now become manifold, and he wore the locket on its little chain himself.  He did not think that Cynthia loved him—­yet, but he had the effrontery to believe that she might, some day; and he was content to wait.  He saw that she avoided him, and he was too proud to go to the parsonage and so incur ridicule and contempt.