gford there were not many suitors for a young lady to choose
from, but it was understood that, such as there were, Aggie Purcell would
have her pick of them. The other young ladies were happy enough if they
could get her leavings. Miss Purcell of the Laurels was by common consent
the prettiest, the best-dressed, and the best-mannered of them all. To be
sure, she could only be judged by Queningford standards; and, as the
railway nearest to Queningford is a terminus that leaves the small gray
town stranded on the borders of the unknown, Queningford standards are not
progressive. Neither are they imitative; for imitation implies a certain
nearness, and between the young ladies of Queningford and the daughters of
the county there is an immeasurable void.

The absence of any effective rivalry made courtship a rather tame and
uninteresting affair to Miss Purcell. She had only to make up her mind
whether she would take the wine-merchant's son, or the lawyer's nephew, or
the doctor's assistant, or, perhaps, it would be one of those mysterious
enthusiasts who sometimes came into the neighborhood to study agriculture.
Anyhow, it was a foregone conclusion that each of these doomed young men
must pass through Miss Purcell's door before he knocked at any other.

Pretty Aggie was rather a long time in making up her mind. It could only
be done by a slow process of elimination, till the embarrassing train of
her adorers was finally reduced to two. At the age of five-and-twenty
(five-and-twenty is not young in Queningford), she had only to solve the
comparatively simple problem: whether it would be Mr. John Hurst or Mr.
Arthur Gatty. Mr. John Hurst was a young farmer just home from Australia,
who had bought High Farm, one of the biggest sheep-farming lands in the
Cotswolds. Mr. Arthur Gatty was a young clerk in a solicitor's office in
London; he was down at Queningford on his Easter holiday, staying with
cousins at the County Bank. Both had the merit of being young men whom
Miss Purcell had never seen before. She was so tired of all the young men
whom she had seen.

Not that pretty Aggie was a flirt and a jilt and a heartless breaker of
hearts. She wouldn't have broken anybody's heart for the whole world; it
would have hurt her own too much. She had never jilted anybody, because
she had never permitted herself to become engaged to any of those young
men. As for flirting, pretty Aggie couldn't have flirted if she had tried.
The manners