charming.

I deplore the necessity, but I will be pardoned if I pause here to
become somewhat personal, to explain who and what I am and how I came
to be a pastor in Appleboro. To explain myself, then, I shall have to
go back to a spring morning long ago, when I was not a poor parish
priest, no, nor ever dreamed of becoming one, but was young Armand De
Rancé, a flower-crowned and singing pagan, holding up to the morning
sun the chalice of spring; joyous because I was of a perishable
beauty, dazzled because life gave me so much, proud of an old and
honored name, secure in ancestral wealth, loving laughter so much that
I looked with the raised eyebrow and the twisted lip at austerities
and prayers.

If ever I reflected at all, it was to consider that I had nothing to
pray for, save that things might ever remain as they were: that I
should remain me, myself, young Armand De Rancé, loving and above all
beloved of that one sweet girl whom I loved with all my heart. Young,
wealthy, strong, beautiful, loving, and beloved! To hold all that,
crowded into the hollow of one boyish hand! Oh, it was too much!

I do not think I had ever felt my own happiness so exquisitely as I
did upon that day which was to see the last of it. I was to go
a-Maying with her who had ever been as my own soul, since we were
children playing together. So I rode off to her home, an old house set
in its walled inclosure by the river. At the door somebody met me,
calling me by my name. I thought at first it had been a stranger. It
was her mother. And while I stood staring at her changed face she took
me by the hand and began to whisper in my ear ... what I had to know.
Blindly, like one bludgeoned on the head, I followed her into a