"I thought I ought to."
"Ought to!—ought to let me tease you!" echoed the dumfounded Tilly.
Cordelia stirred restlessly.
"Not that, of course, exactly," she stammered. "It's only that—that it seemed somehow like—deceiving you."
For a moment Tilly stared; then, suddenly, she darted across the room and put both arms around the minister's niece. Cordelia was not quite sure whether she was hugging her, or shaking her.
"Oh, you—you—I don't know what you are!" Tilly was exclaiming. "But you're a dear, anyhow!" And it was actually a sob that the astounded Cordelia heard as Tilly turned and fled from the room.
To Sunbridge eyes, "church" that morning was something very new and novel. At eleven o'clock Genevieve and her father piloted their guests to the back gallery where seats had been reserved for them. The minister, a dark-haired, tired-looking man with kind eyes, had arrived some time before on horseback. To Mrs. Kennedy, especially, he looked a little too unconventional in his heavy boots and coarse garments which, though plainly recently brushed, still showed the dust of the prairie in spots. He sat now at one side talking with Mr. Tim while his "congregation" was gathering.
And what a congregation it was! As Genevieve had said, everybody on the ranch came, except those whose duties prohibited them from coming. Singly, or in picturesque groups, they settled themselves comfortably on the back gallery, or along the covered way leading to the dining-room. Even Teresa, in a huge fresh apron that made her great bulk look even greater, sat just outside the dining-room door, where she could easily run in from time to time, to see that the roast chickens in the oven were not burning, nor the beets on the stove boiling dry.
The "pulpit" was a little stand placed at the house-end of the covered way. The "choir" was the piano in the living-room drawn up close to the window, with Genevieve herself seated at it. Nor was the "church" itself devoid of beauty, with its growing vines and flowers, and its shifting lights and shadows as the soft clouds sailed slowly through the blue sky overhead. As to the audience—no scholarly orator in a Fifth Avenue cathedral found that day more attentive listeners than did that tired-looking minister find in the curiously-assorted groups before him—the swarthy Mexicans, the picturesque cowboys, the eager-eyed, fresh-faced young girls from a far-away town in the East.