“Shoulder ache?”
“Not much. I’m all right, I tell you, Doctor. Can’t you get over the idea that a preacher is a man of straw? Why, I—will you try a wrestle with me, sometime—when my shoulder’s fit again?”
Red laughed. “Down you in two minutes and fifteen seconds,” he prophesied.
“Try it, and see.” And Black walked back into the church, his cheek losing its pallor in a hurry.
On that Sunday the Lockharts, his first entertainers, insisted that he come to dinner. Though he had kept his slung shoulder and arm under his gown, the facts showed plainly, and the congregation was full of sympathy. With his housekeeper away, Black could find no way out, though he would have much preferred remaining quietly in his study, with four cups of coffee of his own amateur making, and whatever he could find in his larder left over from Saturday.
So he went to the Lockharts’, and there he met a person who had been in his congregation that morning, but whom he had not noted. She had seen that he had not noted her, but she had made up her mind that such blindness should not long continue. Her appearance was one well calculated to arrest the eye of man, and Black’s eye, though it was accustomed to dwell longer upon man than upon woman, was not one calculated by Nature to be altogether and indefinitely undiscerning.
With Annette Lockhart, daughter of the house, the guest, Miss Frances Fitch, a former school friend, held a brief consultation just before Black’s arrival.
“Think he’s the sort to fall for chaste severity, or feminine frivolity, when it comes to dress, Nanny?”
Miss Lockhart looked her friend over. “You’re just the same old plotter, aren’t you, Fanny Fitch?” she observed, frankly. “Well, it will take all you can do, and then some, if you expect to interest Mr. Black. But—if you want my advice—I should say chaste severity was your line.”