r the little "no-back"
chair--"How can you ask me to stay out here talking with you, when you
know----"

"Oh, I know." Mr. Rollin interrupted quickly. "I know how very thoughtful
and considerate you are for those people, Miss Hungerford. I know what
lofty ideas you have just now of consecrating yourself to the work of
refining and elevating the Wallencampers. I know how coolly you can fix
your eyes on a certain goal, and stumble indiscriminately over everything
that comes in your way. I know what a deucedly superior state of mind
you've gotten into. I know too about Miss B's school, and Miss L's
school, and the Seminary at Mount Blank, and the winters in New York."

There was triumph at last, in Mr. Rollin's tone.

"You have taken pains to collect a great deal of information about me;" I
replied, virtuously concluding that I should disappoint the fisherman
more by not appearing vexed.

"Is it strange?" he continued earnestly, with an unconscious parody on
his usually suave and insinuating manner. "You will allow, Miss
Hungerford, that you might strike one, at first, as not being exactly in
the ordinary line of home missionaries, that is, as not having been
trained for the work, exactly; a sort of novitiate, I mean--confound it!
You will allow that you might strike one at first, as being deucedly new
In that _role_."

After this, I smiled with a faintly malicious sense of satisfaction at
Mr. Rollin's confusion, though I felt that I had been cut to the heart.

"And when I spoke about having found out about your past life," he went
on, struggling desperately with his lost cause; "I did not mean that
there was anything bad, you know; only that you sought pleasant
diversions in common with the rest of humanity, and enjoyed the
Heaven-born instinct of knowing how to have a good time, and weren't
always the ambitious recluse and religious devotee that you choose to be
just at present; though I've sometimes wished that I could turn saint so
all of a sudden, but I couldn't," added the fisherman, despondently; "if
I should go to the ends of the earth in that capacity, nobody'd take any
stock in me, whatever; and, after all, what does it amount to?

"This isn't what I meant to say, any of it;" he sighed angrily. "It's
just what I meant _not_ to say--confound it! You've done gloriously;
you've played the thing through to perfection; you've made an inimitable
success of it; but Wallencamp doesn't offer scope wide enough for y