ther miserable.
They have begun to gossip already. A young man, even though he is a
clergyman, can't be seen always in company with a pretty woman, without
exciting remark. Only yesterday I was asked point-blank whether my niece
was engaged to Mr. Hazard."

"What did you say?"

"I told a lie of course, all the meaner because it was an equivocation.
I said that Mr. Hazard had not honored me with any communication on the
subject. I score up this first falsehood to his account."

"If you lie no better than that, Aunt Sarah, Hazard's conscience won't
trouble him much. When is the engagement to be out?"

"Very soon, at this rate. I thought that Esther, in common decency,
could not announce it for a week or two, but every one already suspects
it, and she will have to make it public within another week if she means
to do so at all. Now that she is her own mistress and lives by herself,
she can't have men so much about the house as she might if her father
were living."

"Do you seriously think she will break it off?" asked Strong
incredulously.

"I feel surer than ever," answered his aunt. "The criticism is going to
be bitter, and the longer Esther waits, the more sharply people will
talk. I should not wonder if it ended by driving Mr. Hazard out of the
parish. He is not strong enough to shock them much. Then Esther is
growing more and more nervous every day because the more she tries to
understand, the less she succeeds. Yesterday, when I took her to drive,
she was in tears about the atonement, and to-day I suppose she will
have gone to bed with a sick headache on account of the Athanasian
creed."

"I must talk with her," said Strong. "I think I can make some of those
things easier for her."

"You? I thought you laughed at them all."

"So I do, but not because they can't be understood. The trouble is that
I think I do understand them. Mystery for mystery science beats religion
hollow. I can't open my mouth in my lecture-room without repeating ten
times as many unintelligible formulas as ever Hazard is forced to do in
his church. I can quiet her mind on that score."

"You had better leave it alone, George! Why should you meddle? Let Mr.
Hazard fight his own battles!"

George refused to take this wise advice. He was a tender-hearted fellow
and could not bear to see his friends suffer. If Esther loved Hazard and
wanted to marry him, she should do so though every dogma of the church
stood in her way, and every old w