"I'm coming," she said.

Then to Elliot: "No; there is no one to--to advise me. I am obliged
to decide for myself."

Wesley Elliot returned to Brookville and his unfinished sermon by a
long detour which led him over the shoulder of a hill overlooking the
valley. He did not choose to examine his motive for avoiding the road
along which Fanny Dodge would presently return. But as the path,
increasingly rough and stony as it climbed the steep ascent, led him
at length to a point from whence he could look down upon a toy
village, arranged in stiff rows about a toy church, with its tiny
pointing steeple piercing the vivid green of many trees, he sat down
with a sigh of relief and something very like gratitude.

As far back as he could remember Wesley Elliot had cherished a firm,
though somewhat undefined, belief in a quasi-omnipotent power to be
reckoned as either hostile or friendly to the purposes of man,
showing now a smiling, now a frowning face. In short, that
unquestioned, wholly uncontrollable influence outside of a man's
life, which appears to rule his destiny. In this rôle "Providence,"
as he had been taught to call it, had heretofore smiled rather
evasively upon Wesley Elliot. He had been permitted to make sure his
sacred calling; but he had not secured the earnestly coveted city
pulpit. On the other hand, he had just been saved--or so he told
himself, as the fragrant June breeze fanned his heated forehead--by a
distinct intervention of "Providence" from making a fool of himself.
His subsequent musings, interrupted at length by the shrieking
whistle of the noon train as it came to a standstill at the toy
railway station, might be termed important, since they were to