She shook her head, looking down, and twisting her handkerchief into a ball in her hands.

"I know you have doubts about some things; but I thought they might be removed by prayer. Have you prayed earnestly to have them removed?" She looked up at him anxiously.

"I've asked to be made to see things right," he replied, choking a little over this unveiling of his holy of holies; "but I don't seem to be able to see some things as you do."

She pondered an instant, looking absently at the headstone of "Hephzibah," who was the later of Robert McCoy's two beloved wives, then she said, with an effort, for these staid descendants of Scottish ancestry were not given to glib talking of sacred things:

"I suppose doubts are sent to try our faith; but we have the promise that they will be removed if we ask in the right spirit. Are you sure you have asked in the right spirit, Lloyd?"

"I have prayed for light, but I haven't asked to have my doubts removed, Marg'et Ann; I don't know that I want to believe what doesn't appear reasonable to me."

The girl lifted a troubled, tremulous face to his.

"That isn't the right spirit, Lloyd,--you know it isn't. How can G.o.d remove your doubts if you don't want him to?"

The young man reached up and broke off a twig of the round, pink crab-apple buds and rolled the stem between his work-hardened hands.

"I've asked for light," he repeated, "and if when it comes I see things different, I'll say so; but I can't want to believe what I don't believe, and I can't pray for what I don't want."

The triangle of Marg'et Ann's brow between her burnished satin puffs of hair took on two upright, troubled lines. She unfolded her handkerchief nervously, and her token fell with a ringing sound against tired Hephzibah's gravestone and rolled down above her patiently folded hands.

Lloyd stooped and searched for it in the gra.s.s. When he found it he gave it to her silently, and their hands met. Poor Marg'et Ann! No hunted Covenanter amid Scottish heather was more a martyr to his faith than this rose-cheeked girl amid Iowa cornfields. She took the bit of flattened lead and pressed it between her burning palms.

"I hope you won't get hardened in unbelief, Lloyd," she said soberly.

The congregation was drifting toward the church again, and the young people turned. Lloyd touched the iridescent silk of her wide sleeve.

"You ain't a-going to let this make any difference between you and me, are you, Marg'et Ann?" he pleaded.

"I don't know," wavered the girl. "I hope you'll be brought to a sense of your true condition, Lloyd." She hesitated, smoothing the sheen of her skirt. "It would be an awful cross to father and mother."

The young man fell behind her in the narrow path, and they walked to the church door in unhappy silence.

Inside, the elders had accomplished the spreading of the tables with slow-moving, awkward reverence. The spotless drapery swayed a little in the afternoon breeze, and there was a faint fruity smell of communion wine in the room.

The two ministers and some of the older communicants sat with bowed heads, in deep spiritual isolation.

The solemn stillness of self-examination pervaded the room, and Marg'et Ann went to her seat with a vague stirring of resentment in her heart toward the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who, with all his learning, could not convince this one lost sheep of the error of his theological way. She put aside such thoughts, however, before the serving of the tables, and walked humbly down the aisle behind her mother, singing the one hundred and sixteenth psalm to the quaint rising and falling cadences of "Dundee."

Once, while the visiting pastor addressed the communicants, she thought how it would simplify matters if Lloyd were sitting opposite her, and then caught her breath as the minister adjured each one to examine himself, lest eating and drinking unworthily he should eat and drink d.a.m.nation to himself.

It was almost sunset when the service ended, and as the Morrisons drove into the lane the smell of jimson-weed was heavy on the evening air, and they could hear the clank of the cow bells in the distance.

Marg'et Ann went to her room to lay aside her best dress and get ready for the milking, and Mrs. Morrison and Rebecca made haste to see about supper.

Miss Nancy McClanahan walked about the garden in her much made-over black silk, and compared the progress of Mrs. Morrison's touch-me-nots and four-o'clocks with her own, nipping herself a sprig of tansy from the patch under the Bowerly apple-tree.

She shared Marg'et Ann's room that night, and after she had taken off her lace headdress and put a frilled nightcap over her lonesome little knot of gray hair and said her prayers, she composed herself on her pillow with a patient sigh, and lay watching Marg'et Ann crowd her burnished braids into her close-fitting cap without speaking; but after the light was out, and her companion had lain down beside her, the old maid placed her knotted hand on the girl's more shapely one, and said:--

"There's worse things than living single, Marg'et Ann, and then again I suppose there's better. Of course every girl has her chances, and the people we make sacrifices for don't always seem quite as grateful as we calculated they'd be. I'm not repinin', but I sometimes think if I had my life to live over again I'd do different."

Marg'et Ann pressed the knotted fingers, that felt like a handful of hickory nuts, and touched the little circle with its two worn-out hearts, but she said nothing.

She had heard that the Rev. Samuel McClanahan was going to marry the youngest Groesbeck girl, now that his children were "getting well up out of the way," and she knew that her mother had been telling Miss Nancy something about her own love affair with Lloyd Archer.

Whatever Mrs. Morrison may have confided to Miss Nancy McClanahan concerning Marg'et Ann and her lover must have been entirely suppositional and therefore liable to error; for the confidence between parent and child did not extend into the mysteries of love and marriage, nor would the older woman have dreamed of intruding upon the sacred precinct of her daughter's feelings toward a young man. She had remarked once or twice to her husband that she was afraid sometimes that there was something between Lloyd Archer and Marg'et Ann; but whether this something was a barrier or a bond she left the worthy minister to divine.

That he had decided upon the latter was evidenced, perhaps, by his reply that he hoped not, and his fear, which he had expressed before, that Lloyd was getting more and more settled in habits of unbelief; and Mrs.

Morrison took occasion to remark the next day in her daughter's hearing that she would hate to have a child of hers marry an unbeliever.

Marg'et Ann did not, however, need any of these helps to an understanding of her parents' position. She knew too well the danger that was supposed to threaten him who indulged in vain and unprofitable questionings, and she had too often heard the vanity of human reason proclaimed to feel any pride in the readiness with which Lloyd had answered Squire Wilson in the argument they had on foreordination at Hiram Graham's infare. Indeed, she had felt it a personal rebuke when her father had said on the way home that he hoped no child of his would ever set up his feeble intellect against the eternal purposes of G.o.d, as Lloyd Archer was doing. Marg'et Ann knew perfectly well that if she married Lloyd in his present unregenerate state she would, in the estimation of her father and mother, be endangering the safety of her own soul, which, though presumably of the elect, could never be conclusively so proved until the gates of Paradise should close behind it.

She pondered on these things, and talked of them sometimes with Lloyd, rather unsatisfactorily, it is true; for that rising theologian bristled with questions which threw her troubled soul into a tumult of fear and uncertainty.

It was this latter feeling, perhaps, which distressed her most in her calmer moments; for it was gradually forcing itself upon poor Marg'et Ann that she must either s.n.a.t.c.h her lover as a brand from the burning or be herself drawn into the flames.

She had taken the summer school down on Cedar Creek, and Lloyd used to ride down for her on Friday evenings when the creek was high.

Rebecca and Archie Skinner were to be married in the fall, and her mother, who had been ailing a little all summer, would need her at home when Rebecca was gone. Still, this would not have stood in the way of her marriage had everything else been satisfactory; and Lloyd suspected as much when she urged it as a reason for delay.

"If anybody has to stay at home on your mother's account, why not let Archie Skinner and Becky put off their wedding a while? They're younger, and they haven't been going together near as long as we have," said Lloyd, in answer to her excuses.

They were riding home on horseback one Friday night, and Lloyd had just told her that Martin Prather was going back to Ohio to take care of the old folks, and would rent his farm very reasonably.

Marg'et Ann had on a slat sunbonnet which made her profile about as attractive as an "elbow" of stovepipe, but it had the advantage of hiding the concern that Lloyd's questioning brought into her face. It could not, however, keep it out of her voice.

"I don't know, Lloyd," she began hesitatingly; then she turned toward him suddenly, and let him see all the pain and trouble and regret that her friendly headgear had been sheltering. "Oh, I _do_ wish you could come to see things different!" she broke out tremulously.

The young man was quiet for an instant, and then said huskily, "I just thought you had something like that in your mind, Marg'et Ann. If you've concluded to wait till I join the church we might as well give it up. I don't believe in close communion, and I can't see any harm in occasional hearing, and I haven't heard any minister yet that can reconcile free will and election; the more I think about it the less I believe; I think there is about as much hope of your changing as there is of me. I don't see what all this fuss is about, anyway. Arch Skinner isn't a church member!"

It was hard for Marg'et Ann to say why Archie Skinner's case was considered more hopeful than Lloyd's. She knew perfectly well, and so did her lover, for that matter, but it was not easy to formulate.

"Ain't you afraid you'll get to believing less and less if you go on arguing, Lloyd?" she asked, ignoring Archie Skinner altogether.

"I don't know," said Lloyd somewhat sullenly.

They were riding up the lane in the scant shadow of the white locust trees. The corn was in ta.s.sel now, and rustled softly in the fields on either side. There was no other sound for a while. Then Marg'et Ann spoke.

"I'll see what father thinks"--

"No, you won't, Marg'et Ann," broke in Lloyd obstinately. "I think a good deal of your father, but I don't want to marry him; and I don't ask you to promise to marry the fellow I ought to be, or that you think I ought to be; I've asked you to marry _me_. I don't care what you believe and I don't care what your father thinks; I want to know what _you_ think."

Poor Lloyd made all this energetic avowal without the encouragement of a blush or a smile, or the discouragement of a frown or a tear. All this that a lover watches for anxiously was hidden by a wall of slats and green-checked gingham.

She turned her tubular head covering toward him presently, however, showing him all the troubled pink prettiness it held, and said very genuinely through her tears,--

"Oh, Lloyd, you know well enough what I think!"