licate,
significant odor just hinted its presence in the air about this
outstretched arm--something which was not a perfume, yet deserved as
gracious a name.

He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a deliberate
gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible
arguments for and against this momentous compact.

"I promise," he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves
together in an earnest clasp.

"Right you are," exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity.
"Mind, when it's all over, I'm going to give you a good, serious,
downright talking to--a regular hoeing-over. I'm not sure I shan't give
you a sound shaking into the bargain. You need it. And now I'm going out
to help Alice."

The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had
left the room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of
abstraction. He strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by
the window, and stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother
Soulsby, who was bending over and attentively regarding some pink
blossoms on a shrub through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying-glass.

What remained uppermost in his mind was not this interesting woman's
confident pledge of championship in his material difficulties. He found
himself dwelling instead upon her remark about the incongruous results
of early marriages. He wondered idly if the little man in the white
tie, fussing out there over that rhododendron-bush, had figured in her
thoughts as an example of these evils. Then he reflected that they had
been mentioned in clear relation to talk about Alice.

Now that he faced this question, it was as if he had been consciously
ignoring and putting it aside for a long time. How was it, he asked
himself now, that Alice, who had once seemed so bright and keen-witted,
who had in truth started out immeasurably his superior in swiftness of
apprehension and readiness in humorous quips and conceits, should
have grown so dull? For she was undoubtedly slow to understand things
nowadays. Her absurd lugging in of the extension-table problem, when
the great strategic point of that invitation foisted upon the
Presiding Elder came up, was only the latest sample of a score of these
heavy-minded exhibitions that recalled themselves to him. And outsiders
were apparently beginning to notice it. He knew by intuition what
those phrases, "good, honest little soul" and "kind, sweet little body