are. You are angry because I said that about landscape gardening.”
“I am not a beggar or a man who undertakes a job he is not competent to perform, if I am poor.”
“Will you undertake setting those grounds to rights, if I buy the place?”
“Why don't you hire a regular landscape man if you have so much money?” asked Jim rudely.
“I would rather have you. I want somebody I can work with. I have my own ideas. I want to hire you to work with me. Will you?”
“Time enough to settle that when you've bought the place. You must go home now. Here, take my arm. This sidewalk is an apology for one.”
Lydia took the young man's arm obediently, and they began walking.
“What on earth are you going to do with all that truck you bought?” asked Jim.
Lydia laughed. “To tell you the truth, I haven't the slightest idea,” said she. “Pretty awful, most of it, isn't it?”
“I wouldn't give it house room.”
“I won't either. I bought it, but I won't have it.”
“You must take us for a pretty set of paupers, to throw away money like that.”
“Now, don't you get mad again. I did want to buy it. I never wanted to buy things so much in my life.”
“I never saw such a queer girl.”
“You will know I am not queer some time, and I would tell you why now, but—”
“Don't you tell me a thing you don't want to.”
“I think I had better wait just a little. But I don't know about all those things.”
“Say, why don't you send them to missionaries out West?”
“Oh, could I?”
“Of course you can. What's to hinder?”
“When I buy that place will you help me?”
“Of course I will. Now you are talking! I'm glad to do anything like that. I think I'd be nutty if I had to live in the same house as that fair.”
The girl burst into a lovely peal of laughter. “Exactly what I thought all the time,” said she. “I wanted to buy them; you don't know how much; but it was like buying rabbits, and white elephants, and—oh, I don't know! a perfect menagerie of things I couldn't bear to live with, and I didn't see how I could give them away, and I couldn't think of a place to throw them away.” She laughed again.
Jim stopped suddenly. “Say.”
“What?”
“Why, it will be an awful piece of work to pack off all those contraptions, and it strikes me it is pretty hard on the missionaries. There's a gravel pit down back of the Bolton place, and if you buy it—”
“What?”
“Well, bury the fair there.”
Lydia stopped short, and laughed till she cried. “You don't suppose they would ever find out?”
“Trust me. You just have the whole lot moved into the house, and we'll fix it up.”
“Oh, I can't tell you how thankful I am to you,” said Lydia fervently. “I felt like a nightmare with all those things. Some of them can be used of course, but some—oh, those picture throws, and those postage stamp plates!”
“They are funny, but sort of pitiful, too,” said Jim. “Women are sort of pitiful, lots of them. I'm glad I am a man.”
“I should think you would be,” said the girl. She looked up in his face with an expression which he did not see. He was regarding women in the abstract; she was suddenly regarding men in the individual.
Chapter IV
Elliot slept later than usual the morning after the fair. Generally he slept the beautiful, undisturbed sleep of the young and healthy; that night, for some reason, he did not. Possibly the strange break which the buying of the fair had made in the course of his everyday life caused one also between his conscious and unconscious state, which his brain refused to bridge readily. Wesley had not been brought face to face, many times in his life, with the unprecedented. He had been brought before it, although in a limited fashion, at the church fair. The unprecedented is more or less shattering, partaking of the nature of a spiritual bomb. Lydia Orr's mad purchase of that collection of things called a fair disturbed his sense of values. He asked himself over and over who was this girl? More earnestly he asked himself what her motives could be.
But the question which most agitated him was his relations with the girl, Fanny Dodge. He realized that recently he had approached the verge of an emotional crisis. If Mrs. Black whom he had at the time fairly cursed in his heart, in spite of his profession, had not appeared with her notice of dinner, he would be in a most unpleasant predicament. Only the girl's innate good sense could have served as a refuge, and he reflected with the utmost tenderness that he might confidently rely upon that. He was almost sure that the poor girl loved him. He was quite sure that he loved her. But he was also sure, with a strong sense of pride in her, that she would have refused him, not on mercenary grounds, for Fanny he knew would have shared a crust and hovel with the man she loved; but Fanny would love the man too well to consent to the crust and the hovel, on his own account. She would not have said in so many words, “What! marry you, a minister so poor that a begging fair has to be held to pay his salary?” She would have not refused him her love and sympathy, but she would have let him down so gently from the high prospect of matrimony that he would have suffered no jolt.
Elliot was a good fellow. It was on the girl's account that he suffered. He suffered, as a matter of course. He wanted Fanny badly, but he realized himself something of a cad. He discounted his own suffering; perhaps, as he told himself with sudden suspicion of self-conceit, he overestimated hers. Still, he was sure that the girl would suffer more than he wished. He blamed himself immeasurably. He tried to construct air castles which would not fall, even before the impact of his own thoughts, in which he could marry this girl and live with her happily ever after, but the man had too much common sense. He did not for a moment now consider the possibility of stepping, without influence, into a fat pastorate. He was sure that he could count confidently upon nothing better than this.
The next morning he looked about his room wearily, and a plan which he had often considered grew upon him. He got the keys of the unoccupied parsonage next door, from Mrs. Black, and went over the house after breakfast. It was rather a spacious house, old, but in tolerable preservation. There was a southeast room of one story in height, obviously an architectural afterthought, which immediately appealed to him. It was practically empty except for charming possibilities, but it contained a few essentials, and probably the former incumbent had used it as a study. There was a wood stove, a standing desk fixed to the wall, some shelves, an old table, and a couple of armchairs. Wesley at once resolved to carry out his plan. He would move his small store of books from his bedroom at Mrs. Black's, arrange them on the shelves, and set up his study there. He was reasonably sure of obtaining wood enough for a fire to heat the room when the weather was cold.
He returned and told Mrs. Black, who agreed with him that the plan was a good one. “A minister ought to have his study,” said she, “and of course the parsonage is at your disposal. The parish can't rent it. That room used to be the study, and you will have offers of all the wood you want to heat it. There's plenty of cut wood that folks are glad to donate. They've always sent loads of wood to heat the minister's study. Maybe they thought they'd stand less chance of hell fire if they heated up the gospel in this life.”
“Then I'll move my books and writing materials right over there,” said Elliot with a most boyish glee.
Mrs. Black nodded approvingly. “So I would.” She hesitated a moment, then she spoke again. “I was just a little bit doubtful about taking that young woman