"Nance," said he, "I've been thinking very much about this parson. I have been wondering if he is right. That he does love the road, the dingle, and the gipsy's camp is easy to see. He loves them deeply. Yet he has deliberately foregone any opportunity to go over the hills with his pack. Think of it, my dear-a, he's preaching! He is a seeming paradox.... It is true his home keeps him. He has a four-gabled cottage set in a group of firs with a garden to the right, as you enter, and an orchard to the left. He has a wife who is comely and smiling, and three or four daughters about.... Now, lady, let me ask you a question?"
"Go on."
Jean François deftly filled and lighted his pipe before continuing.
"Nance," he said earnestly as he flicked the burning match into the dust, "I do not think I would make much of a preacher, do you?"
At first she was inclined to laugh. In one sense the question seemed absurdly ridiculous. Her devil-may-care, whimsical, light-o'-road, brother-o'-Pan, green-woodsy pedler of songs a parson!... But he was serious, so, repressing a smile, she answered him as gravely as she might.
"It is owing to what you call preaching, my dear-a," she replied. "If it is firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, fifthly, sixthly—"
"Please to be serious," he interrupted.
"—Seventhly, ad finem and conclusion," she continued, "with the moral highly evident, like Dr. Thistlewood, Aunt Barbara's pastor, why I should say not."
She accompanied her remarks with a highly significant shrug of the shoulders which she had early learned from the pedler.
"What would you have?" he asked.