Claire did not wait to reply to the banter, but plunged at once into the centre of the thought which had been growing on her for several days.
"Mr. Ansted, do you know, I wish I could enlist both you and your sisters as helpers in the renovation of the old church down town?"
"What! the old brick rookery on the corner? My dear young lady, your faith is sublime, and your knowledge of this precious village limited! That concern was past renovating some years before the flood. It was about that time, or a little later, that my respected grandfather tried to remodel the seats, and raised such a storm of indignation about his ears that it took a century to calm the people down; so tradition says. Whatever you undertake to do will be a failure; I feel it my duty to inform you of so much. And now I am burning with a desire to ask a rude question: Why do you care to do anything with it? Why does it interest you in the least? I beg your pardon if I am meddling with what does not concern me, but I was amused over the affair when the girls came home and petitioned to join the charmed circle. Why a lady who was here but for a passing season or so, should interest herself in the old horror, was beyond my comprehension. Is it strictly benevolence, may I ask?"
"I don't think it is benevolence at all. It is a plain-faced duty."
"Duty!" The heavy eyebrows were raised again. "I don't comprehend you. Why should a stranger to this miserable, little, squeezed-up village, and one who by all the laws of association and affinity will surely not spend much of her time here, have any duties connected with that old box, which the church fathers have allowed to run into desolation and disgrace for so many years, that the present generation accepts it as a matter of course?"
"Will you allow me to ask you one question, Mr. Ansted? Are you a Christian?"