o make one of the team
he was getting up to play the second eleven of East Dene. I took to
him more after that, and really he did not talk to Elsie oftener than
he did to me. More than that, he did not make me feel in the way.

But it was all no go. From deep down in my heart there kept bobbing up
the feeling that somehow I was to lose Elsie, and that this young
parson with the curly head would be the cause of it. Of course, I was
going on to eighteen, and a big fellow for my age, with a moustache you
could see by looking for it. But this was a full-grown man of
twenty-four at the least--for all that his shaven face and sort of
painted-window hair made him look any age from that of a choir boy to
that of a holy angel.

He asked about Elsie's grandfather, saying that he had struggled long
and vainly to get him to come to church, or at least to communion, but
without success. More than that, he seemed to be keeping Miss Orrin
from attending the parish church of Over Breckonton. Miss Orrin, so it
seemed, had good instincts--she was well affected toward religion, but
something always seemed to hold her back. At a certain point she
became silent, and he, Ralph Ablethorpe, could do nothing more with
her. This resistance he hoped, however, to overcome one day. It was
his duty to study the welfare of every soul in his parish, and also of
those wandering and foldless sheep who were cared for by nobody.

I had it on my tongue tip to say that there were many who cared for
souls when they were connected with comely bodies, for that was the
kind of thing that my father was always saying. He took himself for an
advanced thinker whenever he quarrelled with our vicar, but between
times he was as good a conservative as anybody, and stood up for law
and order like the chucker-out of a bar-room.

Elsie had not much to say about her people. She never had. But I told
him, as I always did any one who asked, that her father had been an
army officer, and her mother the only daughter of the Golden Farmer,
only that neither the one nor the other of them could stand the old
man's ways.

Then the young parson, as I found to be his custom, started in to
defend the absent, which is all right when the "absent" is anyway
decent.

"Yes," he said, "Mr. Stennis's habits are certainly eccentric. I
cannot deny that. But after all he does a lot of good in rather
creditable circumstances. He gives shelter to four poor lunatics whom
a