It was the next day on the train on their way to Millerstown, to visit Hiram's church and his family, that an illuminating little incident occurred in the matter of the gifts they were taking to the children.

"What's that package you have, Margaret?" Jennie inquired, rather in the tone of a demand, as the four of them sat in two facing seats of a day coach, Jennie and Sadie having both offered Daniel the seat by the window and regarding Margaret with evident disapproval because she had not offered hers.

"A book for the children," Margaret replied, thinking Jennie's question and tone both somewhat surprisingly impertinent. "An illustrated book of Bible stories. I found very little to choose from in the New Munich shops; this was the best thing I could find. I'm sure your brother Hiram will approve of such a proper book, though it's at the same time one that even naughty little boys will love—just full of gruesome pictures. That's why I got it."

"But Hiram's boys ain't naughty; they're awful well-behaved," Sadie corrected this unjust aspersion.

"I hope not too well-behaved, or I shan't feel at home with them. I like 'the dear, delightful bad ones,' as Riley calls them."

"You had no need to buy them a present, Margaret," Jennie reproved her. "Danny gave me a dollar yesterday for you and him, and then I and Sadie each put fifty cents at—and I got nice presents for the children from us all together."

"What did you pay for the book, Margaret?" asked Daniel. "It looks large."

"I forget exactly; three dollars, I believe, or two-fifty."

"Tut, tut!" exclaimed Daniel hastily. "You're too extravagant!"

"My goodness! Two-fifty or three dollars yet!" cried Jennie. "Money must be a-plenty with you, Margaret."

"I'll tell you what," suggested Daniel fussily: "keep back the presents you brought along, Jennie, and give the book from us all, and then the next time we come to Hiram's we can use those other presents."

"Yes, well, but," objected Jennie, "then I and Sadie won't have paid our full share if Margaret gave two-fifty or three dollars for the book yet."

"Which was it, Margaret?" Daniel inquired a bit sharply. "Surely you know whether you paid two-fifty or three dollars for the book?"

"Does it matter? If you require the exact statistics I remember the price of the book was three-fifty, and they offered it to me for three."

"Then, Jennie," said Daniel, "you and Sadie each give a quarter more and we'll save back the other things until the next time."

And to Margaret's unspeakable astonishment her husband's sisters opened their purses, counted out twenty-five cents each and passed it over to Daniel, who serenely received it and dropped it into his own purse.

"If you're playing a game," said Margaret, holding out her hand, "I'll take my share, please—two and a quarter."

"But you and I are one," said Daniel jocularly, "and what's mine is——"

"Your own?" asked Margaret as he hesitated.

Daniel laughed with appreciation of this witty retort. It was discouraging to Margaret that he always laughed when she was fatuous and never when she said a thing she considered rather good.

"And, my dear," he admonished her, "remember after this that we always put together to buy for Hiram's children. We can do better that way, not only for the children, but it comes lighter on each one of us."

Margaret did not reply. The incident, somehow, struck a chill to her heart.

"It must be," she concluded, "that Jennie and Sadie have some little income of their own and are not entirely dependent upon Daniel."

If this were true, she felt it would exonerate her from some of the forbearance she had been so carefully practising.

As they reached Millerstown just in time for the opening of the service at Hiram's church, Margaret first saw her brother-in-law from the front pew, as he stood before his congregation in his pulpit.

"You take notice," Jennie had warned her on their way from the station to the church, "how the folks in Hiram's church look when we come in and walk up to the front pew."

"At me?"

"Well, at you, mebby, this Sunday, because this is the first time they are seeing you. But it's Danny they look at mostly, such a way-up lawyer as he is, coming into their church. And every year he gives them a contribution yet."

There actually was a stir in the congregation as the party of four was ushered to the pew reserved for them, and Margaret noted curiously the look of satisfaction it brought to the faces of her husband and his sisters.

The village volunteer choir was singing a "selection" as they entered:

"We're going home to glory
In the good old-fashioned way."


In Hiram's prayer, which followed, he informed God, whom he addressed in epistolary style as "Dear God," that "the good old-fashioned way" was plenty good enough for the members of the Millerstown United Brethren Church.

Margaret, unable to keep her mind on the rambling discourse intended to be a prayer, noted that the speaker's accent and diction, while not illiterate, were very crude, that he took a manifest pleasure in the hackneyed religious phrases which rolled stentoriously from his lips, and that he wore an expression, as he prayed, of smug self-satisfaction. She also observed that, like Daniel, he was small, slight, and insignificant looking; and she suddenly realized, with a sinking of her heart, that in this uncouth village preacher she really saw her husband as he would assuredly appear if stripped of the veneer which an earlier training and a college education had given him.

As they sat down after the prayer, Sadie whispered to her: "That's Hiram's Lizzie over there with three of the children." And glancing across the aisle, Margaret saw in the opposite front pew a buxom, matronly young woman, dressed somewhat elaborately in clothes of village cut and with a rather heavy but honest and wholesome countenance; her three children, shining from soap and water, and dressed also elaborately in village style, were gathered with her in the pew.

In the sermon that Hiram preached Margaret couldn't help suspecting that he was, this morning, doing some "special stunts" to impress her, so often did his complacent glance wander down to meet her upward, attentive gaze. For indeed she couldn't help listening to him, so astonishing did his so-called sermon seem to her, so colossal his self-approval.

His theme was Lot's unfortunate career in Sodom, and in his extraordinary paraphrasing of the scriptural story he gave it as his opinion that probably one of the causes leading to Lot's downfall was the ambition of Mrs. Lot and her daughter to get into Sodom's Four Hundred. From the Lot family as social climbers in Sodom, the preacher launched forth into a denunciation of the idle, dissipated lives of fashionable women (with which he assumed a first-hand intimacy), a denunciation that seemed rather irrelevant as spiritual food for his simple village hearers. He hauled into his discourse, without regard to sequence of ideas, time, space, or logic, Martha and Mary of the New Testament, saying that some one had once asked him which of the two he'd have preferred to marry. "Martha before dinner and Mary after dinner," had been his response, and his congregation rippled with amusement and almost applauded. A few moments later he was moving them to tears by his deep-toned, solemn references to death and the grave and "the hollow sounds of clods of earth falling upon the coffin lid."

Before pronouncing the Benediction he asked the congregation to "tarry a moment for social intercourse"; and in the exchange of greetings which followed, Margaret could see how Daniel, Jennie, and Sadie revelled in the obsequiousness of most of these shy villagers before their pastor's distinguished brother and his two elaborately arrayed sisters; for Jennie and Sadie looked very expensive indeed in their near-seal coats which they were sure none but an expert could distinguish from sealskin.

When they presently went over to the parsonage, Jennie informed Margaret that Lizzie's father had "furnished for her." The parlour which they entered was fitted out in heavy old-gold plush sofa and chairs, a marble-topped centre table, a gilt-framed motto over the mantel, "Welcome," and a rug in front of the sofa stamped with the words, "Sweet Home."

At the abundant and well-cooked dinner to which they all gathered immediately after church and which was served without any superfluous ceremony, since "Hiram's Lizzie" kept but one "hired girl," Hiram entirely monopolized the table talk, even ............