"God forbid!" she shuddered, not knowing why, thinking perhaps only what
agonies that would have cost Margaret, and then Priscilla had come in
and their confidences ceased. Priscilla was firm in her theory that
children were too much petted and coddled nowadays, and that more of the
rod and less of rhubarb was what they needed.

Suddenly, just after the second lesson, while the rich ringing voices of
the soldier choir were chanting the "Gloria," little Jim was seen to bow
his head and burrow for his handkerchief. Dwight looked down, bent over
him, whispered a word or two, smiled encouragement and fond assurance,
and, blushing very much, with downcast eyes and his face half hidden in
cambric, the lad came forth and hastened down the aisle and out into the
brilliant sunshine beyond.

"Nose-bleed," whispered Dwight to Mrs. Stone, who leaned back,
sympathetically, from her pew. "It sometimes seizes him just that way."

And the stately service went uninterruptedly on, and Jimmy over home,
and little more was said of the incident until the coming of another
day.

CHAPTER VIII

ACCUSING LETTERS

For a week Miss Priscilla Sanford had been in a state of mind bordering
on the ecstatic. For months letters of portentous size, bearing the
stamp of a great and powerful organization of Christian women, had been
left at her door, and many an hour had that energetic maiden been
devoting to correspondence with boards, committees, secretaries, etc.,
adding much to the burden of the mail orderly, and not a little to his
malevolence. A dour and unsocial Scot was McPherson, as he called
himself, but there was wisdom in the selection, for Kennedy, his
predecessor, was as genial as Mac was glum, and Kennedy's fall from
grace was due mainly to his amiable weakness for the opposite sex, a
trait that had led to his lingering far too long in the early spring
mornings--and many a "storm house"--along the row, and to concomitant
complaint. Letters delayed, letters even diverted from their proper
destination, had been all too often charged to him, for more than one
housemaid, not to mention a mistress or two, was possessed of a devil of
curiosity as to the correspondence of many another, and Kennedy was too
much interested in all of them to be austere. Not so McPherson. There
was not another of his clan, there were but three of his nationality, in
the entire garrison, for seldom, save under the flag of Great Britain,
is the Scot in