Miss Kenton, if you were to take pity on my helplessness!"

"Why, certainly!" She possessed herself of his plate, and began to cut
up the meat for him. "Am I making the bites too small?" she asked, with
an upward glance at him.

"Well, I don't know. Should you think so?" he returned, with a smile
that out-measured the morsels on the plate before her.

She met his laughing eyes with eyes that questioned his honesty, at
first sadly, and then indignantly. She dropped the knife and fork upon
the plate and rose.

"Oh, Miss Kenton!" he penitently entreated.

But she was down the slanting aisle and out of the reeling door before
he could decide what to do.

XI.

It seemed to Breckon that he had passed through one of those accessions
of temperament, one of those crises of natural man, to put it in the
terms of an older theology than he professed, that might justify him in
recurring to his original sense of his unfitness for his sacred calling,
as he would hardly ham called it: He had allowed his levity to get the
better of his sympathy, and his love of teasing to overpower that love
of helping which seemed to him his chief right and reason for being a
minister: To play a sort of poor practical joke upon that melancholy
girl (who was also so attractive) was not merely unbecoming to him as
a minister; it was cruel; it was vulgar; it was ungentlemanly. He could
not say less than ungentlemanly, for that seemed to give him the only
pang that did him any good. Her absolute sincerity had made her such
an easy prey that he ought to have shrunk from the shabby temptation in
abhorrence.

It is the privilege of a woman, whether she wills it or not, to put a
man who is in the wrong concerning her much further in the wrong than he
could be from his offence. Breckon did not know whether he was suffering
more or less because he was suffering quite hopelessly, but he was sure
that he was suffering justly, and he was rather glad, if anything, that
he must go on suffering. His first impulse had been to go at once to
Judge Kenton and own his wrong, and take the consequences--in fact,
invite them. But Breckon forbore for two reasons: one, that he had
already appeared before the judge with the confession of having possibly
made an unclerical joke to his younger daughter; the other, that the
judge might not consider levity towards the elder so venial; and though
Breckon wished to be both punished and pardoned, in the final analysis,