It was when Tillie was seventeen years old—­a slight, frail girl, with a look in her eyes as of one who lives in two worlds—­that Absalom Puntz, one Sunday evening in the fall of the year, saw her safe home from meeting and asked permission to “keep comp’ny” with her.

Now that morning Tillie had received a letter from Miss Margaret (sent to her, as always, under cover to the doctor), and Absalom’s company on the way from church was a most unwelcome interruption to her happy brooding over the precious messages of love and helpfulness which those letters always brought her.

A request for permission to “keep comp’ny” with a young lady meant a very definite thing in Canaan Township.  “Let’s try each other,” was what it signified; and acceptance of the proposition involved on each side an exclusion of all association with others of the opposite sex.  Tillie of course understood this.

“But you’re of the World’s people, Absalom,” her soft, sweet voice answered him.  They were walking along in the dim evening on the high dusty pike toward the Getz farm.  “And I’m a member of meeting.  I can’t marry out of the meeting.”

“This long time a’ready, Tillie, I was thinkin’ about givin’ myself up and turnin’ plain,” he assured her.  “To be sure, I know I’d have to, to git you.  You’ve took notice, ain’t you, how reg’lar I ’tend meeting?  Well, oncet me and you kin settle this here question of gittin’ married, I’m turnin’ plain as soon as I otherwise [possibly] kin.”

“I have never thought about keeping company, Absalom.”

“Nearly all the girls around here as old as you has their friend a’ready.”

Absalom was twenty years old, stoutly built and coarse-featured, a deeply ingrained obstinacy being the only characteristic his heavy countenance suggested.  He still attended the district school for a few months of the winter term.  His father was one of the richest farmers of the neighborhood, and Absalom, being his only child, was considered a matrimonial prize.

“Is there nobody left for you but me?” Tillie inquired in a matter-of-fact tone.  The conjugal relation, as she saw it in her father’s home and in the neighborhood, with its entirely practical basis and utter absence of sentiment, had no attraction or interest for her, and she had long since made up her mind that she would none of it.

“There ain’t much choice,” granted Absalom.  “But I anyways would pick out you, Tillie.”

“Why me?”

“I dunno.  I take to you.  And I seen a’ready how handy you was at the work still.  Mom says, too, you’d make me a good housekeeper.”

Tillie never dreamed of resenting this practical approval of her qualifications for the post with which Absalom designed to honor her.  It was because of her familiarity with such matrimonial standards as these that from her childhood up she had determined never to marry.  From what she gathered of Miss Margaret’s married life, through her letters, and from what she learned from the books and magazines which she read, she knew that out in the great unknown world there existed another basis of marriage.  But she did not understand it and she never thought about it.  The strongly emotional tide of her girlhood, up to this time, had been absorbed by her remarkable love for Miss Margaret and by her earnest religiousness.