got Tim into the choir one
Sunday, and now you can't keep him out of it. Wears a--a--I don't know
what you call it,--something that looks like a short night-gown, and I
have to wash it every other week. I don't mind that, and I do b'lieve
Tim is more of a man than he was, and he sings beautiful. And hain't
learnt nothin' bad there yet, but the minister does some things I don't
approve; no, don't approve. What do you think he does right before
folks, in plain sight, sittin' on the piazza?"

Eloise could not hazard a guess as to the terrible sin of which Mr.
Mason, the rector of St. John's, was guilty, and said so.

"Well," and Mrs. Biggs's voice sank to a whisper as she leaned forward,
"_he smokes a cigar in broad daylight_! What do you think of that for a
minister of the gospel?"

She was so much in earnest, and her manner so dramatic, that Eloise
laughed the first real, hearty laugh she had indulged in since she came
to Crompton. Smoking might be objectionable, but it did not seem to her
the most heinous crime in the world, and she had a very vivid
remembrance of a coat in which there lurked the odor of many Havanas,
and to which she had clung desperately in the darkness and rain on the
night which seemed to her years ago. She did not, however, express any
opinion with regard to the Rev. Arthur Mason's habits, or feel
especially interested in him. But Mrs. Biggs was, and once launched on
the subject, she told Eloise that he was from the South, and had not
been long in the place; that he was unmarried, and all the girls were
after him, Ruby Ann with the rest, and she at least half a dozen years
older.

"But, land's sake! What does that count with an old maid when a young
minister is in the market," she said, adding that, with the exception of
smoking, she believed the new minister was a good man, though for some
reason Col. Crompton did not like him, and had only been to church once
since he came, and wouldn't let Miss Amy go either.

This brought her back to the Cromptons generally, and during the next
half hour Eloise had a pretty graphic description of the Colonel and his
eccentricities, of Amy, when she was a young girl, of the way she came
to the Crompton House, and the mystery which still surrounded her birth.

"My Uncle Peter lived there when she came, and lives there now,--a kind
of vally to the old Colonel," she said, "and he's told me of the
mornin' the Colonel brung her home, a queer-looking little thi