Again New Munich was shaken to its foundations by another startling episode in the chronicles of the Leitzels—the resurrection, as it were, of their New Mennonite step-mother, who took up her residence in a pretty little old stone house a few doors from Daniel's gaudy mansion; the most expensive location in the town, with the trained nurse, who had taken care of Mrs. Danny Leitzel when the twins were born, established in charge of the old woman's cozy small home, as her companion and housekeeper.

"What would we do without you Leitzels to keep us interested, not to say excited?" Mrs. Ocksreider remarked to Margaret one day when she met her on the street. "I never knew they had a step-mother."

"She has always lived out in the country at their old home," said Margaret, "but we all thought she ought to be nearer to us now that she is getting so feeble and helpless; so we brought her in town."

"You mean you brought her in?"

"Mr. Leitzel and I, of course."

"Did she tell you I had called on her?" Mrs. Ocksreider inquired rather defiantly, not wholly free from an uncomfortable sense of embarrassment at the blatant curiosity that had taken her there.

"No, but I saw your card there with a number of others," said Margaret.

"You are with the old lady a great deal, aren't you? It is so nice of you!"

"I am very fond of Mrs. Leitzel," Margaret replied.

"Well, she is a dear," said Mrs. Ocksreider heartily; "one of the sweetest little women I ever met. How prettily and cozily you have fixed up her house! She told me you had done it all!"

"I did enjoy getting her settled near me," Margaret smiled. "She's the greatest comfort and blessing to me—to any one who has the good fortune to come into contact with her. I have known few people in my life so guileless, so kindly disposed toward every one! The world needs more of such souls, doesn't it, as a little leaven in the hardness and sordidness all about us?"

"Indeed we do!" Mrs. Ocksreider piously agreed. "And the dear old lady is equally fond of you, my dear," she assured Margaret, patting her arm. "She seems so grateful to you," she added, putting out a feeler.

"Yes?" said Margaret noncommittally.

"I see Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie going in to see her very often, too," said Mrs. Ocksreider tentatively.

"Oh, yes, every day. They are very attentive to their mother," Margaret replied quite soberly.

"Are they so fond of her, too?" Mrs. Ocksreider asked, curiosity fairly radiating from her ample countenance. "I had never in all these years of my acquaintance with them heard them so much as refer to their step-mother."

"But you were never more than very formally acquainted with them," Margaret returned in a tone of dismissing the discussion. "Has Miss Ocksreider got back from New York?"

"No, I expect her to-night. Come in to see her, Mrs. Leitzel—she adores you! And so few of us see anything of you at all since your babies came. You don't go anywhere any more, do you? Society certainly does miss you."

"You are very kind to say that. I am very much tied down, of course."

"If you could get a good, capable nurse," suggested Mrs. Ocksreider, again tentatively. Margaret did not know that the town was agog at the fact, that, rich as Danny Leitzel was, his wife kept no child's nurse for her babies.

"I am trying to get one, Mrs. Ocksreider."

"If I hear of one, I'll send her to you. Of course you were at the luncheon yesterday, however? Every one was at that."

"What luncheon?" asked Margaret vaguely.

"What luncheon? She asks what luncheon!" exclaimed Mrs. Ocksreider, casting up her eyes in horror. "The Missionary Jubilee Luncheon of course!"

"Oh!" cried Margaret, blushing, for this Missionary Jubilee Luncheon had been an orgy of religious sentimentality in which the entire town had united and nothing else had been talked of for weeks. "I had forgotten all about it. I wasn't out of the house yesterday," she added apologetically.

"But didn't Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie tell you? I remember seeing them in the throngs."

"They didn't speak of it," replied Margaret, not adding the information for which Mrs. Ocksreider yearned, that they did not, these days, tell her anything, since they "did not speak as they passed by."

"But Mrs. Leitzel," pursued Mrs. Ocksreider, "how could you 'forget' a thing like our Missionary Jubilee, unless you were deaf, dumb, and blind?"

"Miss Hamilton never spoke of it to me, and I don't see many other people. The truth is," Margaret owned up, "she and I were not specially interested in it."

"Oh! Why not?"

"Well, I'm inclined to think that the so-called 'heathen' religions are, in most cases, as good as, or better than, the substitute offered by the half-educated missionaries."

"'Half-educated!' Oh, but our missionaries are not half-educated, Mrs. Leitzel!" exclaimed Mrs. Ocksreider, shocked. "Do you know, sometimes I think you are not religious! And one of the women missionaries said yesterday that a woman without religion was like a flower without fragrance, or a landscape without atmosphere."

"Epigrammatic," nodded Margaret, undisturbed. "I doubt whether she thought that up herself."

"Oh, but she was a beautiful speaker! I only just wish you had heard her! You believe at least in a Supreme Being, don't you, Mrs. Leitzel?"

The absurdity of such discussion on the sidewalk was too much for Margaret's gravity and she helplessly laughed. But Mrs. Ocksreider looked so grieved over her that she sobered up and answered, "I hope I have a religion."

"What is your religion, Mrs. Leitzel?"

"Well, I have ideals. Any one with ideals is religious."

"Is that all the religion you have?"

"It's more than I can manage to live up to, and we'd better not have very much more religion than we can live out, do you think so?"

This was rather too deep water for Mrs. Ocksreider and she changed the subject. "Oh, well, every one has to settle these questions her own way. I should think," she quickly added, evidently not willing to miss her chance of clearing up a matter that was in her mind, "that Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie would be rather jealous of their mother's devotion to you. She talks so much of you and she never speaks of them."

"I'm new, you see," said Margaret, starting to move on as she felt the ice getting thin. How these New Munich women could pry! "Good-bye," she nodded as she hurried away before she could be further sounded.

"I don't wonder, though," she thought on her way home, "that people are curious and suspicious. How Jennie and Sadie can have the face, after years of cruel neglect of their mother, to lavish upon her, now that she has a fortune to will away, such obsequious and constant attention and devotion—oh, it's nauseating! And their mother isn't a fool; she is not taken in by it for one minute, I can see that."

It was only that morning that, when she had run in to see Mrs. Leitzel for a minute, she had found her just concluding a strictly private interview with her New Mennonite preacher and a young lawyer of the town whom Margaret knew by sight.

"Don't tell Danny what you seen here, my dear, will you?" the old woman nervously asked when they were alone. "Danny would take it hard that I got another lawyer to tend to my business. But you see, Margaret, I have afraid Danny would lawyer my money all off of me if he got at it."

"I'll not say a word to him," Margaret had reassured her.

"Jennie and Sadie, and Hiram when he comes to see me, now, once a week, worries me so to make my will," she continued in a distressed voice. "Hiram he tells me Danny's got so much more'n what he has and you got more'n what his Lizzie has, so I had ought to leave what I got to his children. And Jennie and Sadie says they can't hardly get along since they had to give up so much to me and I had ought to leave it to them when I die, because Danny's got a-plenty to do with a'ready and a rich wife yet, and Hiram lives so tight he don't need more'n what he's got. 'And, anyway,' Jennie says to me, 'of course I and Sadie would will all we had to Danny's and Hiram's children. You could even make ............