"I shall not have the pleasure of your company so far," she returned with a smile.
"No," he responded naively. "I am going only to Springfield."
"Ah," she said, smiling again; and too late he realized that she had meant that she was not going through.
He was the more vexed with himself because he was sure that his confusion was so plain that she could not but see it, and that it was with a kind intention of relieving his embarrassment that she spoke again.
"I am going to visit my grandmother in Brookfield."
He replied by some sort of an unintelligible murmur, and was doubly angry with himself for being so shy and awkward. He glanced furtively at the trim young man opposite, and was relieved to find that that individual was reading and giving no heed. He wondered why he should be so completely thrown out of his usual self-possession by this girl, so that when he talked to her, and was most anxious to appear at his best, he was most surely at his worst. There came whimsically into his head a thought of the wisdom of training the clergy to the social gifts and graces, and he remembered the flippant speech of Mrs. Wilson about the need of their being able to pay compliments.
"I seem to be specially stupid when I try to talk to you," he said with boyish frankness.
"Am I to take that as a compliment or the reverse?" she asked.
"It must be a compliment, I suppose, for it shows how much power you have over me."
He was reassured by her smile, and felt that this was not so badly said.
"The power to make you stupid, I think you intimated."
"Oh, no," he responded, with more eagerness than the occasion called for; "I didn't mean that."
She smiled again, a smile which seemed to him nothing less than adorable, and yet which teased him a little, although he could not tell why. She took up the novel which lay in her lap.
"You forget," he answered, "that I am a deacon. At the Clergy House we do not read novels."
"How little you must know of life," returned she.
There was a silence of some moments. The train rushed on, past fields desolate under patches of snow, and stark, leafless trees; over rivers dotted with cakes of grimy ice; between banks of frost-gnawed rock. The landscape in the dim January afternoon was gray and gloomy; and as day declined everything became more lorn and forbidding. Maurice turned away from the window, and sighed.