“Well, not especially. Did you want anything of me?”
“You’re a church-member, aren’t you, ma’am?” asked the Deacon, abruptly.
“I am.”
“Orthodox?”
“O yes,” with a smile. “You had a reason for asking?”
“Yes, ma’am; I had, as you might say, a reason for asking.”
The Deacon laid his hoe on the top of the fence, and his arms across it, and pushed his hat on the back of his head in a becoming and argumentative manner.
“I hope you don’t consider that I’m taking liberties if I have a little religious conversation with you, Mrs. Forceythe.”
“It is no offence to me if you are,” replied Mrs. Forceythe, with a twinkle in her eye; but both twinkle and words glanced off from the Deacon.
“My wife was telling me last night,” he began, with an ominous cough, “that her niece, Clotildy Bentley—Moses Bentley’s daughter, you know, and one of your sentimental girls that reads poetry, and is easy enough led away by vain delusions and false doctrine—was under your charge at Sunday-school. Now Clotildy is intimate with my wife,—who is her aunt on her mother’s side, and always tries to do her duty by her,—and she told Mrs. Quirk what you’d been a saying to those young minds on the Sabbath.”