Chapter IV


Elliot slept later than usual the morning after the fair. Generally
he slept the beautiful, undisturbed sleep of the young and healthy;
that night, for some reason, he did not. Possibly the strange break
which the buying of the fair had made in the course of his everyday
life caused one also between his conscious and unconscious state,
which his brain refused to bridge readily. Wesley had not been
brought face to face, many times in his life, with the unprecedented.
He had been brought before it, although in a limited fashion, at the
church fair. The unprecedented is more or less shattering, partaking
of the nature of a spiritual bomb. Lydia Orr's mad purchase of that
collection of things called a fair disturbed his sense of values. He
asked himself over and over who was this girl? More earnestly he
asked himself what her motives could be.

But the question which most agitated him was his relations with the
girl, Fanny Dodge. He realized that recently he had approached the
verge of an emotional crisis. If Mrs. Black whom he had at the time
fairly cursed in his heart, in spite of his profession, had not
appeared with her notice of dinner, he would be in a most unpleasant
predicament. Only the girl's innate good sense could have served as a
refuge, and he reflected with the utmost tenderness that he might
confidently rely upon that. He was almost sure that the poor girl
loved him. He was quite sure that he loved her. But he was also sure,