When a year after she had moved into town old Mrs. Leitzel died, it was Margaret's private conviction that the Leitzels had worried her to death trying to find out how she had made her will. It is said that people of mild temper are usually obstinate, and the fact stands that no one of them ever succeeded in getting from the old woman the least hint as to the disposition she had made of her large property.

"She would tell you," Daniel used to urge Margaret to find out the coveted secret.

"But I don't care to know."

"I do. Find out for me."

"Not for any consideration on earth or in heaven, my dear, would I lift my finger about a matter which is so absolutely Mrs. Leitzel's own private and personal concern and no one else's."

The suspense and impatience with which, after her death, they awaited the reading of the will, seemed to let loose every primitive animal instinct of covetousness, and scarcely could they restrain, within decent bounds, their fierce suspicions of each other and their hawklike greed for the prey at stake.

When it was found that after a bequest to the New Mennonite denomination, and one to the nurse, Miss Wenreich, the entire remainder of the fortune of the deceased was left unconditionally to Margaret, the sensations and sentiments of the Leitzels were dynamic. Even Daniel was more chagrined than pleased. An economically independent wife, he had already found, was not the sort of whom Petruchio (who expressed Daniel's idea exactly) could have said:

"I will be master of what is mine own:
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything;
And here she stands, touch her whoever dares."


One couldn't maintain the Petruchio attitude, which was certainly the true and orderly one, toward a wife who had a large income of her own and was strangely lacking in a proper respect for her husband.

It was not until Daniel discovered that Margaret had scruples about accepting the money that he found himself as fearful lest it should pass out of his family into the hands of strangers as he had hitherto been eager to get it into his own hands. The pious and solemn arguments he employed to convince her of her duty in the matter, far from having any weight with her, rather confirmed her in her feeling that, having forced the Leitzels to give up a third of their possessions to their step-mother, it put her too much in the light of a self-interested plotter to have the money come round eventually to her.

It was, however, Catherine Hamilton who convinced her that she could justly keep it.

It was a trial to Catherine to be obliged, when speaking of the Leitzels to Margaret, always to curb her tongue to a hypocritical form of respect for them; for Margaret would not countenance any reflections upon them. So Catherine's remarks, in the present instance, though clearly conveying her meaning, were veiled.

"Do you think, Margaret, that the Leitzels, for their own spiritual discipline, ought to lose or get that money? Was old Mrs. Leitzel wise or wrong in willing it away from them? Will you be wronging or helping their immortal souls—if they have any," Catherine ventured rather fearfully to add, "if you give it back to them? Another thing: you have already learned enough about married life to know that only in economic independence can a woman have any moral or spiritual freedom; can she be a personality in herself, distinct from her husband's. With all this money of your own, you will be free to control the education of your children as you could not if your husband's money had to pay for their education. Of course, in most cases, I suppose mothers and fathers have no difficulty in agreeing perfectly about their children's education; but when they differ radically, what a boon to a conscientious mother to have means at her command to do for her children what she thinks essential for th............