"Oh, that's odd. Not any at all?"
"No. I guess she is like me. She doesn't know any of the members or care a hill of beans about them. Why did you ask if we were Catholics?"
"Because Catholics are looked down on so much around here. If you had said you were one, I was going to ask you not to mention that to my father, either. The greatest trouble my family ever had came through the Catholics. You see, I had a brother. He died five years ago. He was a professing member of our church, and father was awfully proud of him because he was a fine exhorter at revivals. When he wasn't more than sixteen my brother actually preached in public, though he wasn't ordained. They called him 'the boy wonder' and many people were converted under him."
"I've seen his sort," John said, reflectively. "They had one down our way, a sissy of a chap, that women fairly went crazy over, but you say your brother died."
"Yes, but not before he caused us that great trouble," Tilly went on. "It was this way. Father's chief ambition was to have him preach, and when he was about twenty, and after father had saved and stinted to put him through the Methodist seminary, an Irish family moved here. They were Catholics. There was a girl in the family, and in some way or other George got acquainted with her and got to visiting at her house. You know the Catholics have no church here—there are so few of them—but at her house my brother met Catholics who talked to him and gave him books to read. The truth is, he fell in love with the girl and our trouble began. She and her folks somehow convinced him that her religion was the oldest one—that it was really established by our Lord, and that all the other denominations had shot off from it. George had the manhood to come to father and tell him what he believed and that he was going to join the Catholics, so that he and the girl could marry according to Catholic rites. I was too young to know what it was all about, but I was terrified by father's fury. He acted like a crazy man. He couldn't eat or sleep. He disowned my brother and drove him from home. George married the girl and they all moved away. By accident we heard that he had died of consumption away out West, and then a man—a Catholic, some kin of George's wife—came to deliver some message George had sent from his death-bed. We were all sitting in the parlor. Before father would let him say what the message was father asked the man if George died a Catholic, and when the man said he did and that a priest had been called in, my father refused to hear the message and showed him the door. My mother seemed willing to listen to it, but she always obeys my father. They are almost exactly alike, and so she said nothing."
The gate latch clicked. Voices were heard from the house. "They are back. I'll have to go in," Tilly said, and she sighed as from weighty memories awakened by her recital.
John got up and Tilly took his arm again. It seemed to him that her hold upon it was somehow insecure, and he took her hand and drew it higher up. He had never touched her hand till now, and, while it was rough from her accustomed toil, by contrast with his own brick-and-stone rasped palm, it felt as soft as velvet. There was a warm lack of resistance in it and he released it reluctantly. How glorious and bliss-drenching seemed the moonlight as it lay on the landscape! And it was not to end, he told himself. There was the party to look forward to. That would give him another chance to see her alone. He was a strong man, and yet he was all but swooning under emotions which he had never dreamed could exist.
"Oh, there they are!" he heard Mrs. Whaley exclaiming.
Tilly now released John's arm, stepped forward, and casually explained the mishap in the chicken-house.
"The same thing happened some time ago," Mrs. Whaley said, pleasantly, to John. "We've got too many chickens, anyway. I'm going to ship some of them off."