Page:Solo (1924).pdf/88

 "Oh, Paul," Gritty broke the silence, speaking with a hushed, ecstatic admiration, "I wouldn't a dreamt you'd ever a dasst do a thing like that! Not even John Ashmill would a dasst! What'd Miss Windell a said?"

He pictured himself bursting into the old kitchen with the story on his lips—no text this time. A tardy realization of Aunt Verona's sense of fitness brought back his composure as if by magic, for instead of the dreaded blank expression he saw Aunt Verona's lips work strangely and her hands give a little nervous jerk—while her eyes half narrowed and she walked to the stove to test an iron with a moistened finger.

"I think Aunt Verona would have laughed," he said; then added, with a touch of repressed glee, "I'm sure she'd have laughed—to herself!"

A few days later he was walking along the bluff and was arrested by the sight of a group of people in black clothes standing up to their waists in the river. The penitents were being baptized. Paul knew the rite. "They call it the Jordan!" he remarked to himself, and sat down on the cliff to watch. "Like sheep dipping," he commented cynically, then caught himself up, for into his mind had come the echo of something Mark Laval had once said about narrow-mindedness. "But it won't make Becky whiter than snow," he mused.

After supper that night there was a ring at the doorbell.

"It's the minister to see Paul," Mrs. Kestrell announced, in her most subservient manner.

For a moment Paul was intimidated. He would fight the minister if need be, but would rather elude him. He remembered the days when he had answered the bell for Aunt Verona.

"Say I'm not at home," he instructed, with a not too successful attempt at lordliness.

"Oh, but" Mrs. Kestrell began.